Balbir Singh writes:
Hello, List,
I need the following clarification about the LinuxBios boot up information
- Can LinuxBios boot from CDROM?
- Can LinuxBios boot from a SCSI Disk?
Yes. But the drivers have not yet been written.
- Does anybody have a FAQ or collected information about how the
LinuxBios bootup sequence works?
Not especially as this is a work in progress, at the moment.
The design: - All booting under LinuxBIOS will load standalone executables that do not need BIOS calls to access the hardware - Information will be passed in the LinuxBIOS table to the loaded kernel. - The LinuxBIOS core will have a dumb bootloader with one hardware driver and it will load static ELF executables, this is to prevent feature bloat. - Either the LinuxBIOS core loads the final kernel, or it loads a bootloader. - Either the bootloader is stupid and scans ~= the first 8K of a device looking for an ELF image to boot, or it is smart and parses filesystems.
On the side of stupid bootloaders, I have just finished enhancing the development version of etherboot: http://www.etherboot.org So that it has allows the specification of a boot order, (compile time, run time or a cmos option). This supports quite a few NICs, and IDE, and floppies. Though the code needs a little more stabalization work.
The bootloader story with LinuxBIOS is a work in progress, but some good options are starting to emerge.
Adam Agnew, and Ollie Lho have a forked version of etheroboot with filesystem support. The infrastructure is in place so it can probably be merged cleanly.
There is work on using the kernel as a bootloader with a linux booting linux patch.
I have targeted etherboot first because it can be quite small, allowing for more options in rom chips. With every driver compiled in etherboot is ~= 65KB, and with the eepro100 and the ide driver it is ~= 15KB.
Eric