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Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2003 03:07:58 -0700
From: Alex Zepeda <zipzippy@sonic.net>
To: Andrew McCall <mccall@digitalparadise.co.uk>,
	freebsd-ppc@freebsd.org
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Subject: Re: OldWorld Mac: 1, Boot Loader: 0
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On Mon, Sep 15, 2003 at 09:14:04AM +0100, Andrew McCall wrote:

> I don't know if this is needed or not, but I know quite a bit about how 
> the OldWorld boot process works.

Well feel free to jump in anytime I'm making a stupid gross
generalization.

> Personally, I think its a little easier than the NewWorld boot process, 
> and can make for a much tidier install as there isn't any relience on a 
> HFS+ volume.

I don't really see it, given how broken the OpenFirmware code was in the
OW macs.  No ELF support, no Apple Partition Map support, no support for 
ISO file versions (or at least truncating of the default version), etc.

> One thing I would like to suggest is that its "done-right".  I think 
> that we should be able to have FreeBSD-only systems that boot straight 
> to FreeBSD and have no reliance on MacOS.

Sure, and that's the way it's setup right now.  My problem is that the 
original FBSD loader allocates memory via some OF functions.  About a year 
ago, this was changed to allocate memory by tickling some stuff directly.  

I haven't been able to distil a properly working loader yet as there have
been a bunch of other changes prompted by drastic code changes well
outside the ofw loader.  That's what I'd like to remedy.  If I can get the
loader to allocate memory in an agreeable manner, I suppose that the
kernel would boot just fine.

- alex