RE: booting other oses

[YhLu]

You mean put the kernel and initrd in the ROM (8Mbit) ? So can spare the
flash?

Regards

YH

-----Original Message-----
From: ron minnich [mailto:[e-mail]] 
Sent: Wednesday, August 25, 2004 11:40 AM
To: YhLu
Cc: Dave Aubin; Jakob Praher; linuxbios
Subject: RE: booting other oses

On Wed, 25 Aug 2004, YhLu wrote:
> I guess use filo to load the elf ( the elf will be in flash, and filo
>
> will be in the ROM)

oh yeah ... 1 MB is plenty big enough for even 2.6 kernel + initrd

ron

booting other oses

[ron minnich]

On Wed, 25 Aug 2004, YhLu wrote:
> You mean put the kernel and initrd in the ROM (8Mbit) ? So can spare the
> flash?

No, I have a 1 Mbyte flash on the board. I put linuxbios in the top 64K, 
and a kernel and initrd in the bottom (1MB-64K). The kernel and initrd are 
munged together with mkelfimage. Voila ... kernel boots in seconds.

ron

booting other oses

YhLu  writes:
> You mean put the kernel and initrd in the ROM (8Mbit) ? So can spare the
> flash?

Yes.  You might want to dig up the linux-tiny which helps shrink
the kernel even more but it is doable.

The primary reason for working with etherboot is the prevalance of 2Mbit BIOS
chips.  At 4Mbit, the linux kernel becomes an option.  And at 8Mbit the amount
of work to squeeze a kernel and initrd into it is getting reasonable.

I need to talk to Erik Henderson but hopefully he can be convinced to switch the
next version of beoboot to use kexec.  Two kernel monte is the same principle
just older code.

The kexec interface is in the stable kernel now, and the actual implementation
is in 2.6.8.1-mm4.

Eric

booting other oses

[ron minnich]

On 25 Aug 2004, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> The kexec interface is in the stable kernel now, and the actual implementation
> is in 2.6.8.1-mm4.

good news! we'd like to get out of that business of maintaining our own 
type of kexec :-)

ron

booting other oses

ron minnich  writes:
> On 25 Aug 2004, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> > The kexec interface is in the stable kernel now, and the actual implementation
> > is in 2.6.8.1-mm4.
>
> good news! we'd like to get out of that business of maintaining our own 
> type of kexec :-)

Oh, and I should mention there is i386, x86_64, and ppc support in that bundle.

Eric