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From: Peter Grehan <grehan@freebsd.org>
To: Richard DeLaurell <richard.delaurell@gmail.com>
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Date: Fri,  1 Aug 2008 12:24:38 +1000 (EST)
Cc: freebsd-ppc@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: imac rev D 7.0 rel booting issue
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Hi Richard,

>I installed FreeBSD 7 on partitions 11-16; those begin
>at 11g.
 ..
>I seem to remember something about the imacs having an 8g
>limit.  Is this what I am running into?

 I believe this might be the case: it's a limit with
OpenFirmware, which the FreeBSD loader uses to access disk blocks.

>Why does it not affect the NB2 installation?

 As you mentioned, the NetBSD kernel is in the os9 partition,
which is < 8G. Once the o/s has booted, NetBSD (and FreeBSD)
will use hardware to directly access the drives and 

 An issue you have seen is that the FreeBSD loader has no HFS
filesystem support, so it can't boot a kernel that is on the
same HFS partition that it may itself live on.

later,

Peter.