[haiku] Re: Booting Haiku PPC

Matt Emson wrote:

To reply to myself (in a more coherent state):
[...] So, this would need to be a PEF exe, but there on can do whatever. The crucial part here : either the LINUX or NetBSD BeBox projects (I think NetBSD) wrote a tool to convert ELF executables to PEF to allow LINUX to boot on the BeBox. It might work.
The gist was meant to be that the fake PEF kernel file could then chain the real kernel. Also that the boot loader works, works with BeOS and has no worries about BFS* incompatibilities (as the BFS volume would already be able to be read etc...)
* Is the PowerPC Haiku OpenBFS compatible with the Big Endian BFS that BeOS PPC uses? I think it would need to be to do any bootstrapping. It would also make sense if we were to be able to run a side by side comparison of old an new on the same hardware?
The PCI bus on Macs is pretty much a mad thing to use. If that is not currently working, that could be interesting :-)
There's a quote about this in the BeOS Bible. I forget who made it, one of the engineers interviewed by Henry Bortman (sp?) mentions that the Apple PCI implementation is poor in comparison to the x86 one. From what I understand, it's quite often described as a "Grand Cetral Station" implementation.. total chaos.
ADB would be handy, does the system support ADB? Be Inc had ADB in the Kernel for some reason. Without ADB you'd need working USB up front.
ADB is obviously defunct, but a lot of the G3 models (B&W's) still had ADB, and it would make the port a lot simpler to begin with. It would not rely on ironing out the peculiarities of the PCI BUS or Apple's USB implementation. 

M

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