[openbeos] Re: USB and PPC port.... I'm here to help... when I can...
- From: Bryan Varner <Bman@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2002 15:29:12 -0500
>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?)
>"Wasteland" describes the docs quite eloquently. :)
Why thank you.
>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
I was an avid BeOS PPC and X86 user until I switched all my input devices to
USB. Now the USB card on the x86 isn't recognized (has everyone gotten sick of
my complaints on this yet?), and the card in my 7600 requires OS9 (MacAlly
USB/FireWire Combo), and didn't work when I tried it with 8.6. :-(
Hence the reasons I'm hoping to help out with some USB stuff...
>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...
>
>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!
Oh, BTW, I believe that's OS_Chooser. :-p
-Bryan
-----------------------------------------------
In-san-i-ty n., pl. In-san-i-ties. -- Persistant
mental disorder or derangement.
-----------------------------------------------
http://bmanv.no-ip.com -- The looney bin
bman@xxxxxxxxxxxxx -- The keeper of the bin
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