Uwe Hermann wrote:
On Fri, Jul 06, 2007 at 08:55:37AM +0800, Songmao Tian wrote:
Actually, we are using a non-Geode CPU(in fact it's a mips varient). I understand the situation, luckily I got helps from all of you:), thanks again.
Perhaps I will try to port the LinuxBIOS, but if so, I have to port another payload(I am looking into grub2, any other sugguestion?)
GRUB2 is being worked on as part of Google Summer of Code, so that should work soonish...
I see you on the list:)
If you want to port LinuxBIOS to MIPS (which would be great!), please start with LinuxBIOSv3, which is still in early development stages but is a _lot_ better and easier to handle from a development (and user!) point of view.
I am under the way of clean up the start.S code, which is the common work of every thing, also some cache and basic configuration work. after that porting will be much easier.
Other than that, the "typical" payloads in LinuxBIOS are FILO (to boot from disk, for example) or memtest86 (for testing the RAM setup while developing). I don't know whether either of them support MIPS (guess not).
and u-boot is another good option.
Yeah, I've been wondering about this, too. But doesn't u-boot do pretty much the same we do in LinuxBIOS (just for other, mainly embedded boards)?
Or can it be configured to basically _not_ init the system (and leave that part to LinuxBIOS), but only provide a "shell" of some sort for configuration stuff (sorry, I haven't yet played much with u-boot).
u-boot trys to be versatile and small, and some tricky relocation is done to place itself on the top of the available ram (which I think I don't need). but I think with some modification u-boot can be a payload of LinuxBIOS:)
Uwe.