Re: Second round of powerpc subarch investigation : boot-loaders.
On Mon, Oct 20, 2003 at 09:13:01AM +0200, Sven Luther wrote:
> Ok thanks for this response, this clearly clarifies the situation for
> oldpmac, altough i don't really think this will modify our strategy for
> oldpmac : miboot or bootx for initial install, quik for running systems
> and miboot for those not supporting quik.
In some cases, bootx is also easier than miboot for real usage. That's
what I use on my Wallstreet PB so that I don't need yet another
partition on the internal drive. I do sometimes want to boot OS8, and
that's where I use bootx as well.
Ideally, I'd suggest using miboot for actual floppy boot, and putting
both miboot and bootx on the CD installer. Of course, you won't be
able to make miboot actually be useful on the CD with only free
software at this point, due to the issues covered in another thread.
> BTW, so quik needs the .coff kernel, right ?
No, quik uses a normal ELF kernel. The big features of quik:
1) loads a normal vmlinux file as the kernel
2) loads the kernel from ext2 filesystem (with a few small limitations)
3) uses a lilo style config
The .coff kernel is for telling OF to load directly without already
having a bootloader installed in the boot blocks. For example, you
can stick a vmlinux.coff on an HFS floppy and tell OF to load
fd:vmlinux.coff and that's all it takes. Newer OF versions supposedly
support ELF files directly, but I'm not sure when that was added,
or how well it works. If you have a supported file format on a supported
filesystem, then OF can load and execute the file directly according to
the various settings. The OF in early PCI PowerMacs only supported
HFS, FAT, and ISO9660 for filesystems, and only XCOFF as the file format.
Honestly, the .coff kernels are only useful in pretty limited situations.
I suppose you could get a little extra space on a floppy that way. I
only remember using them in the days before bootx and miboot.
Brad Boyer
flar@allandria.com
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