booting from usb?

[Nicholas Mistry]

As being a novice when it comes to linuxbios, i was wondering what would
need to be done to have linuxbios be able to boot from a usb device?

IE:  usb cdrom, usb HD, usb CF reader, usb pen drive, etc....

Is this something that would have to be done (or would be better
accomplished) after linux loads its usb drivers, etc.. ?

[Lee Causier]

I would say that you would need to use a linux kernel with usb support 
in to either (depending on what you're aiming at) load another kernel 
and initrd from a USB device, the bootstrap that (more flexible) or just 
boot, mounting the appropriate USB device as / - safer I would guess 
(not sure) as you can always put in a CD with a working software set,

Bear in mind I may be wrong on this, I'm no expert, so as always, YMMV.
Nicholas Mistry wrote:
> As being a novice when it comes to linuxbios, i was wondering what would
> need to be done to have linuxbios be able to boot from a usb device?
>
> IE:  usb cdrom, usb HD, usb CF reader, usb pen drive, etc....
>
> Is this something that would have to be done (or would be better
> accomplished) after linux loads its usb drivers, etc.. ?
>
> Linuxbios mailing list
> [e-mail]
> http://www.clustermatic.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxbios

[Justin Cormack]

On Wed, 2003-01-01 at 22:22, Lee Causier wrote:
> I would say that you would need to use a linux kernel with usb support 
> in to either (depending on what you're aiming at) load another kernel 
> and initrd from a USB device, the bootstrap that (more flexible) or just 
> boot, mounting the appropriate USB device as / - safer I would guess 
> (not sure) as you can always put in a CD with a working software set,
>
> Bear in mind I may be wrong on this, I'm no expert, so as always, YMMV.
> Nicholas Mistry wrote:
> > As being a novice when it comes to linuxbios, i was wondering what would
> > need to be done to have linuxbios be able to boot from a usb device?
> >
> > IE:  usb cdrom, usb HD, usb CF reader, usb pen drive, etc....
> >
> > Is this something that would have to be done (or would be better
> > accomplished) after linux loads its usb drivers, etc.. ?

If you can, do it after Linux has booted, when it should be easy. But if
necessary you could write a usb storage driver for etherboot. I dont
know enough about usb to know how much of a minimal driver you need (can
you write a polled only driver?).