From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Wed, 15 Sep 1999 12:03:29 +0200 To: linuxppc-dev@lists.linuxppc.org From: Benjamin Herrenschmidt Subject: Apple OF patches: Open source Message-Id: <19990915120329.005173@mailhost.mipsys.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-linuxppc-dev@lists.linuxppc.org List-Id: Ok, I missed this until today, but it appears that Apple's OF patches included in System Disk control panel are actually Open Source (Thanks Peter). So that means that we can include them in quik, provided that we handle the subtle licence issues with Apple's public sources licence. With those patches, we should be able to have clean OF-based boot on all OF machines. The remaining issue is for making bootable install CDs and floppies. My current work on miBoot shoud help. One remaining question is: do we need the CD to be HFS or not. I think I read that OF implementation of ISO was too buggy to allow proper loading of the bootinfo script and secondary booter. Also, we currently didn't manage to get the new OF to load the primary booter from the boot blocs. Also, for miBoot (since i don't beleive old OFs can boot from CDs unless manually hacking into OF), we can move most of the code to the 68k boot blocs of the partition and then use Device Manager code to load the rest from raw blocs. However, the underlying driver may not mount the partition at all unless it's an Apple_HFS. I still have to look more closely at how the bootable CD mecanism is done. Unfortunately, I think it's not documented at all... We may be able to turn miBoot into a fake driver on the CD and have the MacOS ROM load that. -- Perso. e-mail: Work e-mail: BenH. Web : ** Sent via the linuxppc-dev mail list. See http://lists.linuxppc.org/