Nathan,Well... Since I am a "mere mortal" NetBSD user, I was pretty sure somebody already had the same idea or maybe a better one! :-)
I was thinking about the technique and I have to ask: you don't really have to format the partition as HFS before doing a block write of an image file to it, huh? If so, you don't even have to "prepare" the partition before starting from the CD.
Cheers, Flavio On 16/10/2009, at 14:59, Nathan Whitehorn wrote:
Flavio Donadio wrote:We do this on FreeBSD, and it is both pretty simple and works quite well (http://svn.freebsd.org/viewvc/base/head/sys/boot/powerpc/boot1.chrp/ ). It has a simple stage 1 loader that loads the real loader from UFS, and uses a pre-generated HFS template to avoid depending on hfsutils during the build process. Everything but the stage 1 loader should be usable on NetBSD without modification, and the stage 1 loader itself should only require a little work if you want to do the same thing.Andy, I just got an idea.In the installer's partioning process, it should create, no matter what, a small HFS partition for the bootloader. On the CD, there would be a disk image file that would be written, block for block, to the HFS partition created before.This block copy process would eliminate the requirement for hfsutils on the install CD.People: what do you think?-Nathan