After groping around for awhile, with no text output from LB, I came upon the nice document on the website under "port guides"/"VGA support" which detailed the procedure for combining the quartet.rom file with a vga.rom file and this allowed me to see some text output from the LB printk_notice messages, but none of the printk_notice messages come before the call to dev_initialize() which is called late in the hardwaremain() routine. BTW there is a coment in the beginning of hardwaremain() that says:
/* displayinit MUST PRECEDE ALL PRINTK! */ console_init();
Ah.. You are talking linuxbios printk. Sorry I thought you were talking kernel printk. The reference to early printk confused me.
Are you getting messges on the serial port? Its not clear to me.
But this call does not seem to do all that's needed to get printk(printk_notice) messages to come to the console.
You are talking video console here not serial console right?
My goal was to play with the boot order, to boot from CD, to try to get Linux to boot from LB. I see that there is a reference to cmos.layout in src/config/Config.lb which shows option_table.c as dependent on cmos.layout, so if an acceptable way to set boot order etc is to hand edit the cmos.layout file then that's fine, I just need understand it better. This file has the following snipet: #start-bit length config config-ID name
Yes. Typically everything in linuxbios is pre-set in the config files(s).
416 4 e 7 boot_first 420 4 e 7 boot_second 424 4 e 7 boot_third But I'm not sure what to do here, any suggestions? Should I edit this file? How do I make the CD or floppy the first boot? Is there documentation on this?
Doubtfull. Docs are scarce round these parts. The place to look would be in the FILO code. Stefan (I think it was Stefan) reciently added the capability to have some GRUBlike options on booting.
Sorry I can't be more descriptive but I've not played with it yet.
Note that the mainboard/.../Options.lb file has HAVE_OPTION_TABLE=1 so I assume this means it's using the cmos.layout file. Is this true?
Yes. However, we don't do much with that table. grepping the source for HAVE_OPTION_TABLE shows its used in mc146818rtc.c and by the Intel 82801ca southbridge code for checking if the previous boot failed and falling back to the good image.
So unless FILO is using those options then I don't think they do anything.