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From: Peter Grehan <grehan@freebsd.org>
To: Nathan Whitehorn <nwhitehorn@freebsd.org>,
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Date: Wed,  8 Oct 2008 02:00:39 +1000 (EST)
Cc: FreeBSD PowerPC ML <freebsd-ppc@freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: bootloader installation
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Hi Nathan,

>We really need to make installation work better.

 Yep.

>Can we include a port of Apple's HFS implementation
>in base? I know APSL1 was impossible, but are there any
>thoughts on APSL2 now? Having HFS support should also be
>valuable on x86 with more people dual-booting
>FreeBSD/OS X now.

 ZFS shows how to incorporate a piece of s/w that may even
have an unfriendly license. The ppc loader can do a boot-time
module load so the same trick can be applied.

 I would imagine a port of Apple HFS code to be a "big job"
with differences in the o/s maybe harder to mask out than with
ZFS/Solaris since the OSX and FreeBSD have significant
incompatible overlap.

>I suppose that writing a simple write-only HFS
>implementation should not be too hard, either.
>Maybe this could be hooked into gpart bootcode?

 As Marco mentioned, there is hfsutils. Also, NetBSD had a
Google SoC project to implement HFS, that at least produced
some usable code:

 http://netbsd-soc.sourceforge.net/projects/hfs/

 I don't know that the status is in NetBSD proper.

later,

Peter.