How DOES OF Work? (ie multi-OS woes)

How DOES OF Work? (ie multi-OS woes)

[Ira K. Weiny]

>> I am curious: Has anyone ever compared the actual booting times for OF
>> booting and BootX booting (I can't, because my 6400 doesn't OF boot
>> anymore). I suspect the difference is less than 10 seconds. On a total
>> booting time of more than 60 seconds, this is really minimal.
>> 
>> I just rebooted, and the total time of 110 seconds (from typing "reboot"
>> until the login prompt) was spent as follows:
>> 
>> 35 sec: shutdown
>> 23 sec: starting MacOS and BootX extension, hitting the button, waiting
>> for the  
>>         penguin to show up and the kernel messages to start scrolling by
>> 52 sec: rest of linux boot procedure.


> I upgraded a PowerMac 8500 based PPC target system to YDL-1.0 and
> compared the boot times last week. My findings make a rather strong
> argument for OF booting: while BootX booting (using MacOS 8.6) takes about
> 30 secs, the kernel is loaded and started from OF in typically 3 seconds


I think the other side really is for those who don't want to boot the MacOS
at all.  I have had LinuxPPC for 2 years now booting from OF and I almost
got rid of my MacOS partition long ago but thought the best of it.  Now that
I have R5 I am glad I could at least use MacOS to get it installed but I
would still like to have a solution where I would not NEED the MacOS to
boot.

Furthermore, beyond having multiple OS's like NetBSD and BeOS I still have
my OLD release of LinuxPPC.  It is WAY older than even R4 and the only way I
have of booting it is through OF.  

I think the general concensus on this issue is the USERS want BootX or
something easy while the Developers and "Power Users," if you will, want to
have the flexibility of OF.

Anyway it is just my humble opinion that both should be supported.  However,
as a USER hoping to be a "Power User" and even devloper some day, I would
like to see some documentation on how to use OF to boot R5, ANY URL's?

My main question is "HOW THE HECK DOES OF WORK?"

Ira Weiny
iweiny@acm.org


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Re: How DOES OF Work? (ie multi-OS woes)

[David A. Gatwood]

On Fri, 30 Jul 1999, Ira K. Weiny wrote:

> I think the general concensus on this issue is the USERS want BootX or
> something easy while the Developers and "Power Users," if you will, want to
> have the flexibility of OF.

I disagree on all counts here.  It really doesn't have anything to do with
whether yuo're an average user or a developer/power user.  OF is a pain in
the backside.  Virtually its only advantages are for A. netbooting, B. 
fanatically eliminating MacOS from your machine, C. running a server or
other machine that will (almost) exclusively run Linux, or D. using a
machine that can't run MacOS.  Most of the rest of us won't touch OF with
a ten meter cattle prod.  :-)


> My main question is "HOW THE HECK DOES OF WORK?"

IOW, how does it work when it actually does....  ;-)


David


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Re: How DOES OF Work? (ie multi-OS woes)

[Wolfgang Denk]

David,

in message <Pine.LNX.3.96.990730145315.24021C-100000@mvista.com> you write:
> 
> I disagree on all counts here.  It really doesn't have anything to do with
> whether yuo're an average user or a developer/power user.  OF is a pain in

IMHO, it does.

> the backside.  Virtually its only advantages are for A. netbooting, B. 
> fanatically eliminating MacOS from your machine, C. running a server or
> other machine that will (almost) exclusively run Linux, or D. using a
> machine that can't run MacOS.  Most of the rest of us won't touch OF with

Aren't these 4 good reasons?

I never use MacOS. Why do I have to keep it running, and  waste  time
booting it just to start what I want to boot from the beginning?

> a ten meter cattle prod.  :-)

This is your $0.02. But YMMV.

Wolfgang Denk

-- 
Software Engineering:  Embedded and Realtime Systems,  Embedded Linux
Phone: (+49)-8142-4596-87  Fax: (+49)-8142-4596-88  Email: wd@denx.de
It's hard to make a program foolproof because fools are so ingenious.

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Re: How DOES OF Work? (ie multi-OS woes)

[Sean James Swallow]

> I think the other side really is for those who don't want to boot the MacOS
> at all.  I have had LinuxPPC for 2 years now booting from OF and I almost
> got rid of my MacOS partition long ago but thought the best of it.  Now that
> I have R5 I am glad I could at least use MacOS to get it installed but I
> would still like to have a solution where I would not NEED the MacOS to
> boot.

Amen! I have no mac partition, as I haven't since day one.

> Furthermore, beyond having multiple OS's like NetBSD and BeOS I still have
> my OLD release of LinuxPPC.  It is WAY older than even R4 and the only way I
> have of booting it is through OF.  

I boot R5 via OF. =)

> I think the general concensus on this issue is the USERS want BootX or
> something easy while the Developers and "Power Users," if you will, want to
> have the flexibility of OF.

I don't know... It just seems plain silly to me, that to install one OS
you need another. Nothing to do w/ the users.

> Anyway it is just my humble opinion that both should be supported.  However,
> as a USER hoping to be a "Power User" and even devloper some day, I would
> like to see some documentation on how to use OF to boot R5, ANY URL's?
> My main question is "HOW THE HECK DOES OF WORK?"

There is a little bit of info on the apple site about OF:

technote 1061 - http://devworld.apple.com/dev/technotes/tn/tn1061.html
technote 1062 - http://devworld.apple.com/dev/technotes/tn/tn1062.html
technote 1063 - http://devworld.apple.com/dev/technotes/tn/tn1063.html

Chris Ridd also posted some OF command info from Sun's site a while ago.

        http://www.sun.com/pci/pci/pcidevkit/fcodeaac.ps

and there's an OpenBoot 3.x supplement for PCI at:

        http://www.sun.com/pci/pci/pcidevkit/obp_3aag.ps

And there's also a sample PCI Fcode driver at:

        http://www.sun.com/pci/pci/pcidevkit/samplaan.fth


I wish you good luck... Maybe you could come up w/ a way to boot from a
selection of OS'es via OF. But the mac crowd will still wine, as there is
no icons to click on in OF... =/

Sean


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Re: How DOES OF Work? (ie multi-OS woes)

[Grant Erickson]

On Thu, 5 Aug 1999, Sean James Swallow <olaph@takilma.nurk.org> wrote:
> Chris Ridd also posted some OF command info from Sun's site a while ago.
> 
>         http://www.sun.com/pci/pci/pcidevkit/fcodeaac.ps
> 
> and there's an OpenBoot 3.x supplement for PCI at:
> 
>         http://www.sun.com/pci/pci/pcidevkit/obp_3aag.ps
> 
> And there's also a sample PCI Fcode driver at:
> 
>         http://www.sun.com/pci/pci/pcidevkit/samplaan.fth

For what it's worth, these links have changed to:

	http://www.sun.com/io_technologies/develop/pcidevkit/fcodeaac.ps
	http://www.sun.com/io_technologies/develop/pcidevkit/obp_3aag.ps
	http://www.sun.com/io_technologies/develop/pcidevkit/samplaan.fth


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Re: How DOES OF Work? (ie multi-OS woes)

[Michel Lanners]

Hi all,

Here is more documentation on OF specifically, and as related to the PCI
bus in Macintosh systems.

On   4 Aug, this message from Sean James Swallow echoed through cyberspace:
>> I think the general concensus on this issue is the USERS want BootX or
>> something easy while the Developers and "Power Users," if you will, want to
>> have the flexibility of OF.
> 
> I don't know... It just seems plain silly to me, that to install one OS
> you need another. Nothing to do w/ the users.

I completely agree. BootX is a great tool, but I'd like to not be
forced to use it. At this time I am, as OF is not (yet?) able to boot
my G3-upgraded 7600 using quik.

> There is a little bit of info on the apple site about OF:
> 
> technote 1061 - http://devworld.apple.com/dev/technotes/tn/tn1061.html
> technote 1062 - http://devworld.apple.com/dev/technotes/tn/tn1062.html

The links do not work, but you can find the docs in the numeric index.

> technote 1063 - http://devworld.apple.com/dev/technotes/tn/tn1063.html

This one was never written (tn1063 is actually on a different subject),
and later technote 1044 was declared number three in the series. So
look for tn1044 instead.

But most important for OF, there is this article in the TechInfoLibrary
(TIL) about OF on the AN500/700, which includes a very complete listing
of OF commands:

http://til.info.apple.com/techinfo.nsf/artnum/n60285

Then, there are these two technotes on Rhapsody:

http://developer.apple.com/macosx/server/rhapdev/technotes/RTN0001_Rh_Boot_Process.html
http://developer.apple.com/macosx/server/rhapdev/technotes/RTN0002_Dual_Boot.html

This one here outlines the differences of the NewWorld ROM vs. previous
implementations:

http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn1167.html

Now, we move more towards PCI-related stuff, but with OF-related
subjects as well. Here is a gem:

'Designing PCI Cards and Drivers for Power Macintosh Computers'
http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/hardware/DeviceManagers/pci_srvcs/pci_cards_drivers/index.html

If you're interested in PCI bus performance, here is an analysis of the
PCI bus performance under MacOS:

TECHNOTE : Understanding PCI Bus Performance
http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn1008.html

Hope this helps

Michel

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Re: How DOES OF Work? (ie multi-OS woes)

[Andrew B. Arthur]

> I wish you good luck... Maybe you could come up w/ a way to boot from a
> selection of OS'es via OF. But the mac crowd will still wine, as there is
> no icons to click on in OF... =/

See http://www.linuxppc.org/userguide/bootMenu.html for the Open Firmware
boot menu.

It always used to work quite well, so I expect it would work good now.

Supports timeout (after 180 seconds), and presents you with a boot list like
this:

<m>ac os
<l>inux-pmac
<o>pen firmware

Thanks,

Andrew Arthur a.k.a. AArthur
arthur99@global2000.net
AIM: arthur998

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Re: How DOES OF Work? (ie multi-OS woes)

[Jerry Quinn]

>> "Andrew" == Andrew B Arthur <arthur99@global2000.net> writes:

 >> I wish you good luck... Maybe you could come up w/ a way to boot from a
 >> selection of OS'es via OF. But the mac crowd will still wine, as there is
 >> no icons to click on in OF... =/

 Andrew> See http://www.linuxppc.org/userguide/bootMenu.html for the Open
 Andrew> Firmware boot menu.

 Andrew> It always used to work quite well, so I expect it would work good
 Andrew> now.

 Andrew> Supports timeout (after 180 seconds), and presents you with a boot
 Andrew> list like this:

 Andrew> <m>ac os <l>inux-pmac <o>pen firmware

Don't forget, this won't be that useful on 7200-class machines, i.e. you can't
see the screen.  At least assuming that you have someone who isn't a computer
geek who wants to use the machine.

Is there any hope of doing something about the broken OF on these machines?  I 
don't expect that there is, but I can always hope.  The only things I really
see as possible are some kind of boot loader that can kick in at the point
when macOS would normally be loaded from disk or somehow being able to create
new ROMS with correct OF in them.

Thanks,

-- 
Jerry Quinn                             Tel: (514) 761-8737
jquinn@nortelnetworks.com               Fax: (514) 761-8505
Speech Recognition Research


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