* Bari Ari bari@onelabs.com [021009 16:03]:
in message 3DA3D18E.4000109@onelabs.com you wrote:
LinuxBIOS was designed to use Linux to boot the OS of choice.
So was PPCBoot, but without excluding the resto of the world.
Neither does LinuxBIOS.. It can load plan9 and winCE afaik.
It uses some assembly to do some basic init and config and then jumps to Linux to fully configure the rest of the system, after that LinuxBIOS jumps to whatever OS kernel is wanted.
So your boot sequence is LinuxBIOS => Linux => LinuxBIOS => Target OS?
Seems a bit overkill to me. Especially in systems where (flash) memory is tight it might be a PITA to have to reserve space for a Linux kernel just to initialize the hardware.
It's LinuxBIOS => EtherBoot => TargetOS. Linux itself is basically not needed.
For simple systems PPCboot looks like a great way to go. LinuxBIOS would add support and config for more complex systems that include PCI, PCI Express, Infiniband and Hypertransport.
Is there any hypertransport setup code yet? One might assume that some major three letter hardware vendor would not want that code to become public?
Best regards, Stefan Reinauer