Re: OpenBSD and NetBSD

[OKUJI Yoshinori]

From: "Ian Cass" <address@hidden>
Subject: OpenBSD and NetBSD
Date: Mon, 30 Oct 2000 08:46:07 -0000

> Anyway, the newer OpenBSD and NetBSD kernels now expect to be passed the
> location of a memory mapped area containing various values including a BIOS
> map. Older kernels did not insist on this and therefore got away with not
> having this. Newer ones however *do* need this or they will not boot.

  Can you elaborate on the memory mapped area? I don't have NetBSD or
OpenBSD source code at hand, so I cannot examine it myself.

> Ideally what we need is someone familiar in Grub, C and BSD to install
> NetBSD or OpenBSD and either a) make it Multiboot compliant or b) make Grub
> support the newer kernels.

  I hope you will be the "someone". :-)

> Just a quick comment for those ppl who say, "Why not remove the direct BSD
> kernel booting and rely on chainloading?" - direct BSD booting allows
> diskless grub to load a kernel and mount a remote NFS root without having to
> muck about with disk images and ram disks, which doesn't work anyway with
> BSD.

  There are some other reasons that we want to have *BSD
support. Anyway, I'd like to fix/improve the code rather than throwing
away the support.

Okuji