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Re: got quik working with OldWorld G3 Beige 233MHz




On Monday, October 25, 2004, at 01:48 PM, Sven Luther wrote:


Notice that if we manage to free miboot, a miboot kernel on a special
partition may be one solution for 2.6.8 kernels with initrd.


The situation may be worse than we thought. Take a look at Apple Tech Note 1189 which is available at
	http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/pdf/tn1189.pdf

In particular see pages 35 and 36 regarding the licensing required to use the apple patch chaining drivers and associated patches to the Apple boot ROM.

I may be mistaken, but I believe that, when booting from a hard disk (not a floppy), miboot depends on having it's early stages loaded by the Apple OldWorld Boot ROM code, which needs the afore-mentioned patches to do its job.

These patches and the patch chaining driver are placed on the low-numbered partitions of a hard-disk by the Apple disk partitioning utility (or by third-party partitioning utilities that [presumably] use the patches under license from Apple.)

In the listing snippet below, I'm talking about the contents of hdc[2-5] -- the reason why my macOS9 partition is hdc6 rather than hdc2.

This theory would be disproved if anyone had ever gotten miboot to boot from a disk that was missing the driver partitions. Anybody ever tried that?

For NewWorld machines, this seems *not* to be required. I believe that this is because all the code needed to boot is in the Open Firmware. This is the reason why, if you install a PCI disk interface card and you expect to boot from it, you need to be sure that the card has an on-board ROM with Open Firmware booting support that effectively extends the mother-board's Open Firmware so that it knows how to deal with the new card.

Booting from a floppy does not require any patches -- for a couple of reasons: 1) space -- a floppy doesn't have much space and a couple of dozen Kbytes for patches would be highly inconvenient; 2) testing -- the ROM code that deals with booting from floppies must get pretty well rung-out during design test, so it's got to be absolutely bug-free before the hardware is released.

Enjoy!

Rick


============

debian:~# mac-fdisk -l
/dev/hdc
# type name length base ( size ) system /dev/hdc1 Apple_partition_map Apple 63 @ 1 ( 31.5k) Partition map /dev/hdc2 Apple_Driver43 Macintosh 54 @ 64 ( 27.0k) Driver 4.3 /dev/hdc3 Apple_Driver43 Macintosh 74 @ 118 ( 37.0k) Driver 4.3 /dev/hdc4 Apple_Driver_IOKit Macintosh 512 @ 192 (256.0k) Unknown /dev/hdc5 Apple_Patches Patch Partition 512 @ 704 (256.0k) Unknown /dev/hdc6 Apple_HFS untitled 2097152 @ 1216 ( 1.0G) HFS /dev/hdc7 Apple_UNIX_SVR2 root 19531251 @ 2098368 ( 9.3G) Linux native /dev/hdc8 Apple_UNIX_SVR2 swap 1953126 @ 21629619 (953.7M) Linux swap



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