ollie lho ollie@sis.com.tw writes:
On Thu, 2002-09-26 at 09:13, Bari Ari wrote:
ollie lho wrote:
We should start a project call OmniBoot (not OmniBook^TM) which can boot any architecture.
If the source could be shared it would certainly make sense, instead of all this reinventing of the wheel.
Well, I do think there will be a lot of code sharing. As predicted by Ron, those bootloaders are getting more like OS kernel by itself. With careful architecting, we can have a portable bootloader.
API wise etherboot is now portable. And people from other architectures have been picking off it's drivers for a while. And the ELF file format is portable across architectures.
Where Ron missed in his prediction is the size differences between a regular OS and a bootloader. 16KB vs. 600KB is huge.
There still remains a place for multiple bootloaders even if we start getting cross platform bootloaders. Too many people want significantly different semantics.
A challenge with some of the embedded stuff is that a number of the embedded architectures are much easier to boot than pc. So it isn't a problem to merge the system setup code and the bootloader. Blob, ppcboot, and armboot all seem to share that property.
I do not believe they you can easily swap out ram, or have an interesting pci bus on most of embedded bootloaders I have seen. And while you can do it I don't think putting motherboard information into a generic kernel is the right thing to do either.
Eric