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Re: Success!! [was: BootX & Booting without keyboard/monitor]



On Sat, May 12, 2001 at 01:56:56PM -0700, Mike Fedyk wrote:
> > it hasn't been entirely clear that it didn't until recently.. it
> > really should since its was derived from silo which supports symlinks
> > fine.  unfortunatly quik is pretty stripped down and broken compared
> > to silo...
> >
> 
> Is there any active development on quik?

no.

long answer BenH has been talking about throwing away quik's second
stage code and making yaboot compatible with Oldworld OF and quik's
first stage.  this way there would effectivly be only one codebase for
both oldworld and newworld bootloaders.  only the installer and first
stage loader would be different.

for oldworld quik's first stage powerpc asm bootblock would be used,
and its bootblock installer /sbin/quik would be used to save a
blocklist of the elfextracted yaboot.b. 

on newworld you would of course use ybin and its Forth first stage
loader installed onto a dedicated bootstrap partition.  

again i reiterate porting yaboot to oldworld will not make oldworld
magically as easy to OF boot as a newworld.  Oldworld OF is pure crap
and any peice of software is going to have a helluva time functioning
correctly on it.  some of those machines can't even read from the hard
disk which you have to fix before the bootloader even enters into it
(since OF must read the disk to load the bootloader).  

BenH myself and a few others are interested in getting OF booting
cleaned up more because simply put, BootX/miboot are kludges.  period,
macos based booting is fundementally flawed and it would be good for
all concerned if that would just go away. 

> Because of BootX.  I didn't get quik to work until just now, and I needed a
> PPC/Linux box for those purposes.  That is only a 7200/120.  I haven't tried

yes but quik works actually very reliably on 7200's now, ironically
enough they are probably the easiest ones to OF boot now.  you don't
need macos to boot these.

> quik on a 6500 or oldworld g3.  Also have this umax.

6500 i don't know, G3s CAN be OF booted but its quite a bit less
trivial then 7200's.  you pretty much have to install apple's OF
patches, then things will usually work.

> Well, if my versions (8.0 & 8.5) of MacOS don't touch the nvram, then you're
> right.  I know for sure that the 7200's ROM will reset the nvram. Need to test
> 6500 and g3.

i am not sure if its the disk based MacOS that trashes nvram or the
ROM based MacOS that does.  if its ROM based then the MacOS version is
irrelevent, if the ROM is ever run, regardless of whether it even
finds a copy of macos on any disk, the nvram will be reset.  

someone was saying on irc the other day that one of them had some bug
in its nvram checksum check, so it always thought the checksum was
invalid and thus reset it.  if this bug lives in the ROM (which i
suspect) there is nothing Apple can do to fix it (not that they would
care).  

-- 
Ethan Benson
http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/

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