Hi YH and list,
I've been playing with the boot prompt timeouts for Etherboot/filo on my setup.
I've noticed that if I set the combined timeout (the etherboot ASK_BOOT and filo AUTOBOOT_DELAY) to less than about 3 seconds, the system won't boot because filo doesn't see the SATA drives. This example has ASK_BOOT set to -1 (i.e. disabled), and AUTOBOOT_DELAY set to 2 seconds.
--------------------------- Welcome to elfboot, the open sourced starter. January 2002, Eric Biederman. Version 1.3
33:stream_init() - rom_stream: 0xfffc0000 - 0xfffdffff Found ELF candiate at offset 0 Loading Etherboot version: 5.4.1 Dropping non PT_LOAD segment New segment addr 0x10000 size 0x49090 offset 0x0 filesize 0xf7f0 (cleaned up) New segment addr 0x10000 size 0x49090 offset 0x0 filesize 0xf7f0 Loading Segment: addr: 0x00000000bff90000 memsz: 0x0000000000032000 filesz: 0x000000000000f7f0 Clearing Segment: addr: 0x00000000bff9f7f0 memsz: 0x0000000000022810 Loading Segment: addr: 0x0000000000042000 memsz: 0x0000000000017090 filesz: 0x0000000000000000 Clearing Segment: addr: 0x0000000000042000 memsz: 0x0000000000017090 Jumping to boot code at 0x100b0 CPU 2064 Mhz Etherboot 5.4.1 (GPL) http://etherboot.org Drivers: TG3 FILO Images: NBI ELF Protocols: DHCP TFTP Relocating _text from: [000100e0,00059090) to [bfeb7050,bff00000) Probing pci disk... [FILO]FILO version 0.4.1 (root@countzero.vandewege.net) Fri Apr 21 18:47:00 EDT 2006 Press <Enter> for default boot, or <Esc> for boot prompt... 2^H ^H1^H ^Htimed out boot: hde1:/linuxbios.elf No drive detected on IDE channel 2 boot: hde1:/linuxbios.elf^H ^H^H ^Hlf Drive 4 does not exist boot: hde1:/linuxbios.elf ---------------------------
This is only a problem for a cold boot, i.e. from power off. If I do a warm reboot, the system boots fine.
Is there something that can be done about this? It seems silly to have to introduce delays in the bootup sequence to make booting from SATA possible, particularly since fast bootup is one of LinuxBIOS's strengths.
Thanks, Ward.