On Wed, 27 Dec 1995, Jason Thorpe wrote:

> The PROM shouldn't care much about the filesystem type.  All it does is 
> find the end of the superblock of the rootfs, and load the primary 
> bootstrap from there.  The primary bootstrap _does_ care about the rootfs 
> type.  NetBSD's boot code can handle both.

	Well, I'm afraid that it does make a difference (at least on my
4/110 w/ROM revision 2.81).  For the past month and a half, I was not
aware that "newfs" was creating a filesystem which could not be read by
the PROM monitor and was pulling out my hair trying to solve the problem. 
After re-reading "INSTALLATION NOTES for NetBSD/sparc 1.1", I found the
section which reads: 

--- begin quote

NOTE: If you are able to, there is a performance benefit from newfs'ing 
using NetBSD.  If you newfs using the NetBSD newfs command, be sure to 
use the -O flag for your / partition, so that newfs will use the 4.3BSD 
filesystem format, rather than the new 4.4BSD filesystem format.  If you 
forget, you will not be able to boot -- the SunOS boot blocks do not 
understand the extended 4.4BSD filesystem format.

--- end quote

	I'm not the only one who discovered that the PROM monitor can't 
read the default filesystem of NetBSD.

> I'm using new-style filesystems on my Sun 4/260 without a hitch.

	Either your PROM is "smarter" than mine or something is strange 
(ie. the filesystem was created in SunOS originally).

> "perfect world" comment at the top.  I personally have higher priorities 
> than re-writing the install program to have menus, etc.  If someone else 
> wants to take it on, by all means, have at it!  ;-)

	I wish I had higher priorities (like fixing the SCSI code for 
SUN4), but my abilities limit this.  Something like a fancy install 
program would be within my bounds :-)

Mike.

==========================================================================
     Mike Frisch                    Internet: mfrisch@saturn.tlug.org
     Northstar Technologies		       Compuserve: 76620,2534
     Newmarket, Ontario, CANADA       WWW: http://www.io.org/~mfrisch