Re: NetBSD 8.0 on a Mac LC III

On 4 Oct 2018, at 2:54 am, userm57%yahoo.com@localhost wrote:

Hello,

I'm trying to install NetBSD 8.0 on a Mac LC III. In the past,
I've always used the traditional installation method, but that
doesn't seem to work with NetBSD 8.0 -- "Mkfs" and "NetBSD Install"
work in Mac OS as they did before, as long as everything is within
the first gigabyte on the disk, but when booting the system, the
kernel doesn't recognize the filesystem that was created by Mkfs.

So I'm using the sysinst method, which seems to be working, though
slowly.

Some comments and suggestions:

1) If the traditional method no longer works and it isn't supported,
then it should be removed. The traditional method has always had the
issue that it works only within the first gigabyte on a disk, though
it was possible to install a minimal system, then boot into that to
complete the installation (and then use more than the first gigabyte).

It has been a long time, but from memory,

1) the UFS formats and magic numbers, that MkFS /Installer/Booter supports,

have diverged from the ones that NetBSD is using.

2) Perhaps this document:

https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-8.0/mac68k/INSTALL.html#Booting%20NetBSD

needs to throw the Booter stuff into a footnote,

with a message like “Only works with NetBSD 5.2 and Booter 1.11.blah”

or “Only works with <1GB volumes, net install kernel, and Booter 2.0.0"