Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2012 22:24:36 -0800 From: Rob Ballantyne <robballantyne3@gmail.com> To: freebsd-ppc@freebsd.org Subject: Question about bootup Message-ID: <CAKLrb5d=fos09L0fHY3Qdf4YRZ5FYBmHTV21iMzEybB65DpoSw@mail.gmail.com>
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Hi All, I've been poking around trying to understand the boot up process of a ppc64 G5 machine. I was slightly surprised to still find an Apple Partition map disk. I would have thought it was an ordinary fdisk (PC) partition setup. Let me see if I have it right: 1 - OpenFirmware (OFW) load Apple_Bootstrap/boot1.elf 2 - boot1.elf runs to gain enough to understand UFS filesystems and loads FreeBSD UFS partition /boot/loader 3 - loader loads /boot/kernel/kernel ... and we're off to the races. This strikes me as fairly simplistic so I'm sure there are more details. I'm curious about /boot/*.4th OpenFirmware forth code, for example. Is it involved in a substantial way? The other thing I'm curious about is the Apple_Bootstrap partition. How is it written? I've discovered parteditor within the bsdinstall installer. I suspect that does it but it doesn't appear to let one write their own bootloader code image. As I said mostly curiosity and trying to understand. If anyone has a few words of confirmation/advice I would be glad to hear them. Thanks, Rob
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