White Papers

BootX: The Mac OS X Bootloader

Overview The Macintosh has used a more or less unchanged boot mechanism for over a decade. Even with initial introduction of OpenFirmware, little changed. The advent of the iMac, and later Mac OS X, has altered the boot sequence significantly. This paper contains a cursory look at OpenFirmware, the booting mechanisms used by various operating systems that run on the Power Macintosh (such as Linux, NetBSD and OpenBSD), as well as the different booting mechanics of several generations of Macintosh hardware. Particular emphasis will be paid to the boot process of Mac OS X (from the firmware up to early kernel initialization) and its bootloader, BootX.

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Publisher
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
File Format
PDF
Date Published
Oct 1, 2008
Format
White Papers
Topics
Mac OS, Linux - Open Source

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