> >I meant "modern" loosely. Any make that has OF (anything that's a > > ppc > >and not a x1xx) will work. Do OldWorld macs have elf-loader? I > > remember > >there are vastly fewer supported exe formats on pre-OF3 boxes. > > Hmm... my 7600 is definately pre OF3! > To my knowledge, it supposedly loads PEF, not ELF binaries... OF3 > still > supports PEF, does it not? (we could used PEF for the loader?) Actually, OF knows nothing about PEF binaries. OF 3 can load COFF, X- COFF, Mach-O (I think), ELF, A.OUT, and some others, but *not* PEF. OF 2, at the least, can load COFF and X-COFF. If all else fails, we can make our loader in COFF. > >I am the BeOS PPC user, you see :) Also, I have spent an inordinant > >amount of time mucking with the Be bootloader, trying to get it to > > run > >from OF. > > > > _the_ BeOS PPC user? Well... aren't we a bit cocky? (From what I've > seen, you > earned it...) Oh believe me... I've spent more than three or four > sleepless > nights annoying my roomate by bantering about OF and BeOS boot > loading... :-p hehe. Actually, I think there may be 7 or so of us. > >The BeOS kernel certainly uses the ROM fcode drivers, but it uses > > some > >MacOS ones too (more devices are supported using BeOS Launcher than > > OS > >Chooser). The Be bootloader on ppc is a two-step process. The first > >part links to various MacOS shared libraries, and displays the MacOS > >end. For OS Chooser, it pops up the choose system box, for BeOS > >Launcher it displays the options screen, for both it reads the prefs > >file and then uses the CFM to load the Boot 1 resource. We were > > using > >this resource with OF in order to get it to boot, but this fails > >because the first stage passes a complex set of arguments to the > > stage > >2 loader. These arguments contain both the settings from the Prefs > > file > >*and* a device tree extracted from the MacOS. The result is that any > >fcode drivers loaded by the MacOS are used by the BeOS, and the BeOS > >kernel remembers the memory locations of I/O devices from the MacOS > >without talking to OF itself. This is especially useful since MacOS > >kicks the OF runtime out of RAM :P When we saw the level of > > interaction > >between the bootloaders and the OS, we gave up, because it started > >looking really icky. > > After a little digging with PEFViewer, I came to the same > conclusion... > although any sick person with a major case of insomnia (naturally > occuring or > caffeine induced) could _theoretically_ reverse engineer the OS > Launcher by > digging through the ASM from PEFViewer... Unfortunately, I'm not to > that level > of derangement...yet... ICCCK. It requires a deranged mind to try to RE something like that. > >Apologies to the x86 users here, who are probably wondering WTF OF, > >BeOS Launcher, OS Chooser, CFM, and a Boot 1 resource might be :P > >-Nathan > > Hey, they're on inferior processors... they can deal with it!!! :-p > CISC makes me SICK! LOL! Just imagine trying to RE an x86 OS Chooser from asm. Blech. > Oh, BTW, I believe that's OS_Chooser. :-p Oh, so we're being picky, are we? It's actually ' OS_Chooser', where the first character is option-space. :P And I think it was OS Chooser in DR8 (I forget). See, not only am I the ppc user, I've been using BeOS since DR8.2. :) -Nathan -- Fortune Cookie Says: In 1914, the first crossword puzzle was printed in a newspaper. The creator received $4000 down ... and $3000 across.