Re: OpenBSD and NetBSD

[ian.cass]

On Tue, 31 Oct 2000, OKUJI Yoshinori wrote:

>   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.

OK, briefly.

The old arguments to execing the kernel, as you know, is...

(howto, bootdev, BOOTAPIVER, endmark, extmem, cnvmem)

where BOOTAPIVER = 0

the new arguments are...

(howto, bootdev, BOOTAPIVER, endmark, extmem, cnvmem, bootargsmemmap size,
bootargsmmap offset)

The boot args memmap is an array of structures containing information such
as bios block dump, APM, hard drives, consoles.

The BOOTAPIVER here is non-zero and is a bitmask containing info about
what format the memory map is in.

> > 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". :-)

Well, I don't know about that. I've written a few simple BSD drivers
before, but I'm not sure my C is up to this sort of complexity.

Next step is to examine Grub & see how this fits in with what Grub is
already doing.

To be honest I wonder if a similar amount of effort would be better
utilised in making BSD Multiboot compliant, rather than making Grub BSD
compliant.


--
Ian Cass
www.knowledge.com