We are interested in using LinuxBIOS on our medical system, running the Digital Logic P5 PC-104 SBC. After reading these posts, and scanning the FAQ, I am confused about boot methods:
Will LinuxBIOS work on a stand-alone system with a EIDE disk?
If floppy boot won't be supported, can it boot from cdrom?
Thanks very much,
Phil Brooks
Phil Brooks - Software Engineer Olympic Medical 206-268-5119 philb@olymed.com
-----Original Message----- From: Ronald G. Minnich [mailto:rminnich@lanl.gov] Sent: Friday, December 06, 2002 2:21 PM To: Big Pilot Cc: adam@cfar.umd.edu; linuxbios@clustermatic.org Subject: Re: Booting from floppy
On Fri, 6 Dec 2002, Big Pilot wrote:
So there are two issues: a) DOS isn't supported and b) the floppy as a boot device isn't supported. That will make it a very difficult sell for mobo manufacturers. Can you imagine me buying a Linux PC with LinuxBIOS and it crashing. How am I going to repair it then?
floppies are dead. What's wrong with a cdrom boot?
ron
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We are interested in using LinuxBIOS on our medical system, running the Digital Logic P5 PC-104 SBC. After reading these posts, and scanning the FAQ, I am confused about boot methods:
Will LinuxBIOS work on a stand-alone system with a EIDE disk?
yes, definitely.
If floppy boot won't be supported, can it boot from cdrom?
It is not that it "won't be supported" as much as there wasn't much of interested. That's all. I bet it is just at most one day of work to get booting from floppy to work.. so it is not a big deal.
It would be much easier if you could put what's the target OS you are going to run, as it would make answering question easier. For example if you don't need PC BIOS services (it is what ADLO/BOCHS-BIOS is about) then there are tons of other ways to configure LinuxBIOS.
On Fri, 6 Dec 2002, Phil Brooks wrote:
Will LinuxBIOS work on a stand-alone system with a EIDE disk?
yes.
If floppy boot won't be supported, can it boot from cdrom?
yes.
Phil, you are welcome to visit LANL if that will help with other questions. We have lots of p5 systems here with linuxbios.
ron
"Phil Brooks" PhilB@olymed.com writes:
We are interested in using LinuxBIOS on our medical system, running the Digital Logic P5 PC-104 SBC. After reading these posts, and scanning the FAQ, I am confused about boot methods:
The initial poster asked a bad question. Booting DOS from a floppy does not work. Nor is it even a primary target. But there is some recent work in that direction. And given that everyone assumed he was asking about the recent work.
Will LinuxBIOS work on a stand-alone system with a EIDE disk?
Yes.
If floppy boot won't be supported, can it boot from cdrom?
There is a floppy driver.
To put it clearly the LinuxBIOS core does not really support booting from anything except a ROM chip. And it really only supports booting a bootloader of some sort. That said there are a number of interesting bootloaders for LinuxBIOS that let you boot off of all kinds of things, IDE drivers/network cards/floppies etc. And as long as the support is put into a bootloader and not the LinuxBIOS core it is even encouraged for people to fill in the missing gaps.
The various bootloaders are maturing and people are starting to find LinuxBIOS useful so we shall see where it goes.
Eric
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Adam Sulmicki -
ebiederman＠lnxi.com -
Phil Brooks -
Ronald G. Minnich