Stefan Reinauer stepan@suse.de writes:
- Eric W. Biederman ebiederman@lnxi.com [031119 03:23]:
Possibly a better term would be failsafe image.
What happens is that if everything looks good the fallback image hands control to the normal one. Otherwise it keeps control.
Note: IIRC, the "normal" image is called with protected mode already running, so it needs a different startup code (entry32.s instead of entry16.s?)
Yes.
Also, the failsafe image does not do cmos option handling afair?
Correct. That is so the failsafe image will do a known thing.
Right now with etherboot I have been able to keep the two fairly symmetrical. But it is my intention to start sticking a kernel in the flash now that 512KiB byte flash chips and above are getting common. Etherboot was to a large extent about getting something small enough that it could always be used. Once I start sticking a kernel in flash the normal image should start picking up some capabilities not available otherwise.
Right now the big benefit of having the two images is that once you have fallback image working, you can continue development without the need to even remove ROM chips.
Eric