OpenBSD Booting

[ian.cass]

Hi,

I've looked at this problem a few times over the last few days with a view
to fixing it. Bootloader programming is new ground for me, but it seems to
be pretty straightforward so far. That's not to say I'm capable of fixing
it though :)

Quick analysis....

OBSD booting stopped working just prior to the 2.5 release. We're now
gearing up for 2.8 so it's not worked for over a year now.

Comparing the 2.4 and 2.8 OBSD source tree reveals differences in
/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/i386/machdep.c - there's a whole load of new code
in there. The new code checks and actions the arguments sent when the
kernel is called by the bootloader. Seems one of the arguments is a
'bootapiver'. Grub does not send a 'bootapiver' as far as I can tell &
it's therefore zero (or null). 2.4 code would handle this OK, but >2.4
requires the bootapiver to be >=2. So far as I can tell, all I need to do
is modify bsd_boot in grub to pass the appropriate parameters to the
kernel. Hopefully I'll find time over the next week or so to try this. I
do hope it doesn't turn out to be something a lot more tricky.

If there's any OpenBSD C programmers out there perhaps they might like to
have a look into this a bit to save me a job? I've a feeling that any
modifications to make OpenBSD work would break NetBSD booting. OpenBSD and
NetBSD may need to be separated within Grub.

Ideally OpenBSD would be modified to be multiboot compliant, but I fear
this is beyond me.

--
Ian Cass
www.knowledge.com