On Tue, Oct 16, 2001 at 12:56:18AM -0400, Albert D. Cahalan wrote: > > You have forever destroyed my innocent faith in the beauty > of Apple hardware. Shame on you! :-( I now declare the > modern PC architecture to be a coherent and efficient design. > Even the A20 line and MBR are looking good now. try a NewWorld box, they actually have clean design. (akin to sparc hardware). > An aborted attempt to switch? It makes no sense to even have > the OpenFirmware code if it isn't used. actually the first stage in switching to OpenFirmware, nubus macs and 68K macs had no OpenFirmware, only the MacOSROM. > > the next is a 4MB ROM with the core of MacOS burned onto it (on very > > old macs this was actually complete enough to boot without any other > > media). > > This is 680x0 code too, isn't it? yes, basically, it also includes a 68K -> ppc emulator to run it in. /me goes away while people vomit. > On a new system, with "ROM" coming from an HFS partition, > the driver partitions make no sense at all. not really, but they are still required due to the legacy cruft nature of the ROM itself and MacOS. (and we thought win95 on DOS was bad). do keep in mind if you trash MacOS on a newworld box you don't need that ROM on disk, or driver partitions or anything, OpenFirmware happily boots yaboot and yaboot happily boots a kernel. (yaboot is a cousin of silo). > One would want to make the bootloader be a wrapper that can > supply the old driver when booting MacOS, and then write a > MacOS program (extension?) to fix up the bootloader at shutdown. > Yeah, fat chance anyone would. aiee, that would be nasty... anything set to run at shutdown of MacOS is fragile since 90% of the time you don't shutdown MacOS willingly, you press the reset switch on the box. -- Ethan Benson http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
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