Ronald G Minnich rminnich@lanl.gov writes:
On Thu, 31 Oct 2002, Kevin Hester wrote:
I recall reading a white paper about Linuxbios and patches so that the kernel can boot other kernels? Does anyone know where this code is? I've poked around with no luck.
just go with kexec, it's the standard now for 2.5. There are other packages but my inclination is to go with whatever comes with the base kernel.
Ron that logic unfortunately does not work. So far Linus has just ignored kexec. kexec is the only one available for 2.5.x though.
For our application, I'd like to place a minimal kernel into the FLASH with the BIOS. That kernel would either use IP or IDE to read in the 'real' kernel.
that's how we do it here. Works quite nicely.
I considered chaining into Etherboot, but I need to boot from IDE drives in addition to Ethernet. The Etherboot CAN_BOOT_DISK flag seems to require IDE read funtionality in the BIOS (a no-no with linuxbios?).
No, there is an ide driver in etherboot. But you get no filesystems.
There is a point of disagreement in this community: is linux too heavy to be a boot loader, but is its complexity needed; is etherboot a nice and light and fast bootloader, but is it too simplistic. That is the disagreement described in its broadest form.
For now, here at lanl, we come down on the side of using Linux wherever possible and we have been happy with that decision. Just yesterday I had a problem with etherboot that was solved by using Linux as the bootloader instead. Overall I prefer using Linux as my bootloader, but I am also extremely impressed with etherboot's growing capabilities.
If I could seriously get the attention of the kernel developers. And stabalize the kernel so it properly shutdown the hardware I would be more persuaded. At least until I can get kexec into the kernel or we start a our own kernel tree for network booting and develop from there I am not especially interested in using the Linux kernel because it does not work correctly.
Eric