On Tue, 8 Jun 2004, Frank wrote:
You missed the point!
Yes, I did miss the point (I should've read more closely).
at u-boot and you'll find support for just about every PPC and the number of drivers are abundant. I can port u-boot to a new PPC based board in about 3 days tops. There is no way I can port LinuxBios to a new X86 based board in that amount of time.
I haven't looked at u-boot code much, so I cannot compare ease of porting to a new board. However, LB doesn't seem all bad in that area from where I stand. Of course it's going to be difficult if you switch architectures, but once the initial work is done it's a piece of cake. I was get an Iwill DK8S2 (Dual opteron board) running in less than 3 days simply by duplicating the Arima HDAMA (Another dual Opteron board) code and tweaking some config files, and I'm just a student working here and not some l33t hacker like Eric or Ron. No hacking on assembly code (Or even C code for that matter) was required.
As far as architectures go, LinuxBIOS has run on Alphas, x86, x86-64, and now PPC. It's portable. And since freebios2 is took a huge leap in reducing the amount of assembly required to do a port, it should be easier now than it was before.
On Tue, 8 Jun 2004, Frank wrote:
not waste time trying to make it work for the PPC. If I wanted a bootloader I would use u-boot not LinuxBios. I have heard of other people abandoning LinuxBios and going to u-boot in that past, just like I did...
You ought to try FILO as a payload for LinuxBIOS. I think it accomplishes what you wanted a year ago ( http://www.clustermatic.org/pipermail/linuxbios/2003-June/003789.html ).
--- "Hendricks David W." dwh@lanl.gov wrote:
IIRC, that's what Greg's addition of FILO for PPC was all about.
On Tue, 8 Jun 2004, Frank wrote:
Finally, someone has recognized the lack of support with LinuxBios. About 6 months ago we decide to do an x86 based project but abandoned it because of the lack of support for
this
bootloader. The code is disorganized and in disarray as far
as
I'm concerend. We were on a tight schedule and didn't have
the
luxury of spending a lot of time trying to understand the
code
layout. This was due in part to the lack of badly needed documentation and code organization. We decided to base our design on a powerpc and go with u-boot. Hopefully by the time we decide to do cost reduced version, LinuxBios will be usable for the masses and not just for an elite group of people who assume everybody else uses the x86
for
everyday use.:-(
--- Greg Watson gwatson@lanl.gov wrote:
On Jun 8, 2004, at 7:59 AM, Stefan Reinauer wrote:
- Greg Watson gwatson@lanl.gov [040608 15:22]:
I think this is a reasonable idea, particularly your
suggestion of
making linuxbios more modular. One of my main beefs
with
the payload
strategy is that each payload has to provide it's own
set
of,
potentially buggy, driver code. If we have 5 payloads
then
we have 5
sets of drivers that all do the same thing slightly
differently. If
the drivers were modular enough so that a payload could
call
them
directly, then this would go a long way to addressing these
concerns.
As far as I can tell the only drivers involved would be
output drivers,
ie. video output and serial output. There the extensible
LinuxBIOS
table could come into play. The video driver could store a
pointer
to the
framebuffer, the resolution and maybe even a font, to
save
duplicates.
Serial is only a kilobyte or so of a driver i think.
Have I forgotten something?
PCI device code and resource information should be
available
for payloads to use. A payload should not have to re-probe for devices on the PCI bus.
Greg
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