[Debootloaders-miboot] current status of miBoot

Piotras piotras at gmail.com
Wed Jul 26 19:02:24 UTC 2006


Hi,

I have both miBoot_1.0d4 and miBoot-1.0a3-ek working. That said
I haven't done any work on it in the last two months.

At this stage I don't consider it release ready. However it can
be used for testing. There is no much work with the miBoot source
code necessary before the release. It's more about providing the
components it requires during build and at run-time.

The TODO list:

1) Reimplementation of the boot block
The specification is ready. We need to a person with some knowledge
of m68k assembly. Some knowledge of MacOS APIs would be helpful
as well.
Temporarily I use original Apple boot block.

2) Reimplementation of tiny part of Apple run-time library
I need to have clean-room reimplementation of 6 trivial functions.
These should be documented by Apple.
Temporarily I use my own reimplementation. However it should not
be redistributed as I implemented these looking at the original
assembly.

3) Remove dependency on UniversalInterfaces
I read the license again and actually it will not be possible to
redistribute this code with Debian. It's necessary to reimplement
fragments based on Apple specification. Possibly there is some
overlap with libmacos from Emile project. I could also check
licensing of older distributions of UniversalInterfaces.
Temporarily I use UniversalInterfaces with some patches for GCC.

4) Remove dependency on PEF
Essential parts of PEF (Preferred Executable Format) are covered by
Apple patents, so I'd prefer stay away from PEF. I started to work
on adding XCOFF loader in miBoot. This change is going to increase
the size of miBoot image by about 1-2kb.
Temporarily I use my own quick&dirty XCOFF to PEF converter during
build and PEF at run-time.

5) Fix bug related to weak symbol handling
There is a simple workaround possible. I didn't work on it since it
affect very limited number of machines (these with no name registry).

I should not work on 1 and 2 as I've seen reverse-engineered Apple
code.

4 and 5 are not essential I guess.


Regards,

Piotr Krysiuk



More information about the Debootloaders-miboot mailing list