Yaboot to boot Mac OS X on PCI/Firewire drive ?

Paul Nasrat pnasrat at redhat.com
Thu Jan 4 21:13:25 EST 2007


On Sun, 2006-12-31 at 16:04 -0500, alex.nishri at utoronto.ca wrote:
> Can Yaboot be used to boot into Mac OS X, from a disk connected via a
> a PCI/Firewire card ?

No, the way yaboot handles booting OS X is to just use Open Firmware to
load BootX the OS X bootloader, it doesn't have any PCI code that could
be used to activate the PCI/Firewire card.

If your card has FCode available for it you may be able to make it work
with the BW G3 in Open Firmware.

> Using Mac OS X 10.3, booted from the internal IDE card, I set
> the "startup" disk to be the Firewire disk with Mac OS 10.3 installed.
> The resulting NVRam Open Firmware boot-device variable is set to 
> bridge/pci1106,3044 at 4/node at 50770e0bf5da3b/sbp-2 at 4000/@0:10,\\:tbxi

If BootX (APSL) supports PCI Firewire, you may be able to get it to load
the kernel from the firewire disk by installing/configuring it on a
partition on the   - but my instinct would be it won't as it also
probably supports only devices via Open Firmware.

http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/osx/arch_boot.html

"BootX can load kernels from various filesystems: HFS+, HFS, UFS, ext2,
and TFTP (network, abstracted to look like a filesystem). In addition to
Mach-O, BootX can also load ELF kernels, although Mac OS X does not use
this feature. To reiterate, BootX can load ELF kernels from an ext2
partition!"

It doesn't talk about devices so I'm pretty sure that won't work.
Whether you can do somethig smart with putting Xnu on the internal drive
bootstrap partition with a seperate root on PCI IDE is again something
I'm not sure about and probably isn't a supported configuration.
Basically you'd probably make a Boot HFS+ volume, put the kernel, etc on
the syste, bless it and have it configured somehow to pull the right
root partition.

Paul




More information about the Yaboot-users mailing list