Re: miboot floppies and non-free apple boot sector.

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

On Fri, Aug 27, 2004 at 11:38:31PM -0400, Nathanael Nerode wrote:
> Sven Luther asked: 
> >BTW, what about an upload of miboot to non-free ? What would be needed for
> >that ? A simple permission from apple ?
> 
> Permission for Debian and its mirror network to distribute the boot sector.  
> That's all that would be needed for non-free.

Yeah, thought so.

> --
> Regarding clearn-room reverse-engineering "step one", if it's in the form of 
> assembly language for a known architecture, I'd be willing to make the 
> plain-English description (though someone who's already 'contaminated' by 
> looking at it should ideally do it).

Yes, it is of the following form :

  start of the sector is simple boot sector data, and well documented on apple
  site, i don't think those will be a problem.

  Then follows a bit of m68k assembly, and i know already that those are plain
  trap instructions to make a bunch of mac os rom calls, but not much more.

  Since the boot sector is 1024 or something such bytes, there is not a
  plethora of instructions there, so it should be pretty easy.

Now, ideally, it would be needed to dissassemble this, list the mac rom calls
done, and then describe what those mac rom calls do.

> However, looking at pure machine code is a *lot* less fun than looking at 
> assembly language.  :-(  Can someone perhaps disassemble it, as a first step?  

Yeah, but if i want to implementit afterward, i cannot see the dissasembled
version, or i could just as well use the verbatim boot sector anyway.

> (Incidentally, if it's purely m68k machine code, does that mean that the m68k 
> emulator in the PowerMacs was in hardware?)

No, i believe the emulator was in the pmac rom.

Friendly,

Sven Luther