Sunday, June 22, 2014

iQUIK update

I now have a 1.5Ghz PowerBook 12" in my possession to test iQUIK with. This is of course a NewWorld, and not a primary target for the iQUIK boot loader...

Couple of observations to be made:
  • OpenFirmware 3.0 doesn't support partition zero booting (i.e. hd:0 or CHRP-spec hd:%BOOT). This means that iQUIK cannot be booted the same way as it boots on OldWorlds,  but neither is it required. iQUIK can be booted on NewWorlds the same way as Yaboot, i.e. placing 'iquik.elf' on an HFS+ partition and blessing it. 
  • NewWorld OF requires appending ":0" for full-disk access to disk devices
I've also fixed a bug inside partition code that truncated offsets to 32 bits, and improved device path handling and parsing.

In short, though, it works. And it works quite well. So iQUIK now works on OldWorld and NewWorld machines. Yaboot - only on NewWorlds. Of course, Yaboot also supports CHRP machines, network booting and reads all filesystems supported by the underlying OpenFirmware implementation. So there's plenty of work to reach feature parity in that regard.

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