[openbeos] Re: USB and PPC port.... I'm here to help... when I can...
- From: "Nathan Whitehorn" <nathan.whitehorn@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2002 14:36:50 -0600
> >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
--
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