On Thu, Feb 10, 2000, Ethan Benson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >doesn't Miboot also require non-free Apple bootblock code in the 1K >bootblock of the HFS partition?
Hum... the status of this bootblock code is difficult to determine. It's only a few bytes of 68k assembly that calls the ROM _InitFS trap and loads the remaining "boot " resources (and those contain only miboot code). It would be difficult to write it differently. Also, any bootable CD needs to have a this and the Apple CD driver in the partition map. When burning a bootable CD with Toast on MacOS, Toast will actually extract the CD driver from the MacOS driver and will put it in the partition map. If we _really_ want to make something absolutely and completely stripped of any Apple code, miBoot should be turned into a fake CD driver burned in the disk's partition map. This is possible but more complex and I didn't have time to do yet. The current mecanism is really enough to make bootable distribution CDs, and since all CD burning software always put those boot stuffs on bootable CDs, I beleive there's no legal problems here. >bootable CDs would rock, its not easy to accomplish however, in theory >a small HFS partition with a CHRP script set to type tbxi and miboot >as well should boot properly on all macs, but for oldworld macs you >would need a non-free apple CD driver too.. and CD booting is >reportedly a bit broken when you add ISO to the mix.. Yep. If you need bootable CDs, you need the CD to begin with an Apple partition map (with a special layout for CDs) containing a CD driver and at least one HFS partition with miBoot & yaboot on it. New versions of the various redhat-based PPC distros will appear soon with bootable CDs, so you'll be able to see how it's actually implemented. For the "linux" part of the CD, you have several solutions: You can simply have an ext2 image in a big file on the HFS partition and mount it via loopback (slow). You can also probably add ext2 partitions using the apple partition map of the CD, I _think_ the kernel will see them. You can probably also do a multicession CD with the bootable HFS stuffs in the first session, but tests must be done to see if MacOS can boot such CDs.
