[Coco] New Improved Nitros9 Booting

[Brett Gordon]

Maybe cobbler can be changed a bit to add a command line switch to
ignore the track 34 install of the REL/BOOT/KRN combo.  It won't find
them anymore in memory with a bootup from CoCoBoot.  Track 34 stuff
should still be in there for the people wishing to keep support for
the old-school booting.

That's quite neat that cobbler reads the module layout from memory.
Good Stuff.  I'm finding it hard to find documentation on some of the
standard os9 commands like cobbler, os9gen an the such.  I would hate
to have to read (and understand) all the source!

I should point out that the existing incarnation of the Nitros9 setup
wizard only works with RBF images utilizing 1 sector cluster sizes.
>From what I understand it is very uncommon to have anything more than
this.

The source for the wizard is under the "contrib" directory as
"os9l2.fs" in the SVN at sourceforge if anyone wants to see.

I'll shortly be working on Nitros9 Level 1 booting, but I might take a
break to mess around with Aaron's Virtual Serial Port protocols in
DriveWire 4.

Brett Gordon

>Boisy G. Pitre boisy at tee-boy.com
>Sun Feb 12 20:24:26 EST 2012
>
>Robert,
>
>Cobbler also writes REL/BOOT/KRN to track 34. With the new boot method, >cobbler will probably fail.
>
>I envision a version of NitrOS-9 that is supported exclusively by CoCoBoot. >This version would have no cobbler and no os9gen. What version that will be, I >haven't decided.
>
>Best Regards,
>Boisy G. Pitre
>
>
>>On Feb 12, 2012, at 7:20 PM, Robert Gault wrote:
>>
>> Cobbler does more than set a pointer to OS9Boot in LSN0. Cobbler takes >>the modules as they exist in memory and creates a new OS9Boot file. This >>means you can change descriptors in memory with programs like dmode, >>tmode, wmode, and xmode and after using cobbler the changes will be >>"permanent".