Re: Bootloaders, was Re: [RFC PATCH 0/3] m68k goes DT

[Finn Thain]

On Tue, 4 Mar 2025, Daniel Palmer wrote:

> FWIW I have started to move EMILE over to using meson to build (so
> it's easier to build on modern systems) and fixing up some of the
> issues it has with building with recent GCC.

Thanks for doing that.

> I have it working enough to boot HEAD on a LC475 and on QEMUs Q800
> machine. While the penguin ui is nice EMILE seems to work well enough
> and it can be used to generate bootable CDs.

That's good news -- I've long wondered whether QEMU's emulated q800 had 
reached a point where it could run EMILE. That will make development 
easier.

> I have a setup now that can generate a bootable CD with the kernel and a 
> buildroot based userland that I can drop on the SD card for my bluescsi 
> and boot into Linux without any macos intervention.
> 

I guess it's only a matter of time before someone puts EMILE into EEPROM. 
(Many of these systems have a ROM SIMM slot.)

> So basically, for 68k mac I think EMILE is the way to go.
> 

And there is a way to go...

Penguin 19 works on every 68k Mac model. That's hard to achieve and 
running under MacOS helps a lot. EMILE doesn't have that advantage so it 
isn't expected to enjoy the same level of hardware compatibility without 
further work.

For systems that have the standard ROM, booting MacOS is an easy first 
step for system recovery purposes or just experimentation. So I think 
EMILE needs a MacOS UI which, though it might not boot Linux, could do the 
bootloader installation and config (a bit like what XPostFacto did for Mac 
OS X) so the ROM could then boot into EMILE (and Linux).