New booter (about quik)

[Paul Mackerras]

Michel Lanners <mlan at cpu.lu> wrote:

> No, quik is a two-part boot process. quik installs a first-stage boot
> loader in the boot block of a disk partition. I admit I am not sure if
> this partition needs to be a HFS partition, or if it can be an ext2
> partition... (Paul?)

No, it needs to be an ext2 partition.  AFAIK the first 1k of an HFS
partition isn't free.

The way that the older OF boots from a hard disk partition is that it
uses a couple of fields in the partition table entry which give the
location of the bootstrap in terms of the start and length of a
contiguous set of blocks in the partition.  OF just loads those blocks
into memory and jumps to them.  The quik installer program sets those
fields to point to the first 2 blocks of the partition.

So in principle it would be possible to put the quik first-stage
bootstrap on an HFS partition.  You would just have it as a contiguous
HFS file somewhere and set the partition table entry to point to it.

Paul.


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