On Sun, Apr 19, 2009 at 10:47 AM, M. Warner Losh imp@bsdimp.com wrote:
In message: f488382f0904190128l4383a56eu67a2f16eb338e61c@mail.gmail.com Steven Noonan steven@uplinklabs.net writes: : I eventually decided it made more : sense to get QEMU working instead. I did notice that the pre-OpenBIOS : version of QEMU was able to boot Mac OS X via Open Hack'Ware, so I was : annoyed to find that OpenBIOS didn't have such support. So, I might as : well add it.
Open Hackware was barely enough to boot older versions of Linux. Other operating systems that needed more extensive properties from the OpenFirmware device tree failed to boot because they weren't present. I was involved in a large effort to get FreeBSD/powerpc booting on QEMU only to have it fail utterly because the amount of hacking on OpenHackWare needed was rather large and mysterious...
Yes, Open Hack'Ware is as much a hack as PearPC is, in my opinion. It uses very strange design decisions, which I suppose were inspired by an "I'll do this later" attitude. For instance, in the CHRP script 'parser' it has, it will do a CRC of the boot script and then do a table lookup to figure out what to do next, i.e.:
case 0xEA06C1A7: /* MacOS 9.2 boot script: * the XCOFF loader is embedded in the file... */ case 0x53A95958: /* iBook 2 restore CD (MacOS X 10.2) */ [snip] goto out; case 0x8d5acb86: /* Darwin-7.01 * The executable file is embedded after the script */ break;
Quite clearly, Open Hack'Ware was aptly named. It seems to have made no effort to actually -execute- the CHRP boot-script, and instead just do whatever would be necessary to get specific OSes working. Blech.
- Steven