> I've been hacking away at (finally) getting the powerpc version > booted > (again?). First of all, the openpic module, crucial to the powerpc > boot sequence, doesn't compile. I have a patch, but it mostly just > does whatever needed to <i>get</i> it compiled; it will definitely > have problems. I'll need to hack around the kernel for more time > before I figure out what I need to do. Yes, maybe we should have a generic PIC loading code anyway... Just send the diff, I'll commit it. > But, once openpic compiles, jam struggles through the rest and > finally > finishes. Technically, it succeeded, but the disk isn't bootable. I'm > not even really quite sure what it produced; but it's nothing that I > can recognize. Well it can't be anything else than a BFS *partition* image. That is only the content of the filesystem itself, without any partition table. That's the reason it breaks on some emulators I think btw, they expect part tables sometimes. > Apple, at the very least, uses the Apple Partition Map (APM) layout > to > boot. OpenFirmware, the Apple's New World computer's BIOS, looks at > the first (technically, second: the APM itself counts as a partition) > partition for a file that it can boot. (more info here: > http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/osx/arch_boot.html and here [PDF]: > http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~gerbal/BootX.pdf . So, this is going to be my > main priority over the next few days: creating an image with the > three > partitions on it (the APM, the bootstrap, 800k HFS partition, and the > final BFS partition, along with a primitive bootloader. We already do support APM, at least there is code for it and the bootloader use it, see src/system/boot/loader/Jamfile. If you want to play with HFS, I found some old naive mkhfs code I wrote that used the libhfs, I did that when I ported PearPC to test stuff... See http://revolf.free.fr/beos/mkhfs-beos-src.zip I don't recall the licence for libhfs, but mkhfs.c itself can be reused under MIT without problem. If I recall well, libhfs actually creates a full disk image, that is with the partition table. But maybe it's optional. I wrote that long ago. > The cool thing about this map is that, theoretically, both ppc and > apple's i386 macs can boot it, using a universal binary. So if I get > this image working, intel macs will be able to boot this sucker. > Cool, > 'ey? Our build system doesn't support that yet, so doing so would have to be manual. Still funny. François.