Does anyone think it is possible the offer the user a choice of commandline parameters. I would like to use the serial console, or something else convienient, to allow the user to choose commandline1 or commandline2. One of them mounts root over nfs, the other from the hard drive. I guess this would be a simplified boot loader such as lilo or grub. Unfortunately this 'boot loader' must reside in the flash chip, since my hard drive will initially be completely blank.
John
Does anyone think it is possible the offer the user a choice of commandline parameters. I would like to use the serial console, or something else convienient, to allow the user to choose commandline1 or commandline2. One of them mounts root over nfs, the other from the hard drive. I guess this would be a simplified boot loader such as lilo or grub. Unfortunately this 'boot loader' must reside in the flash chip, since my hard drive will initially be completely blank.
Well, u could put grub or lilo on flash, either of them works with linuxbios. The space may be big tight though.
Well, u could put grub or lilo on flash, either of them works with linuxbios. The space may be big tight though.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but I don't understand how you do this. Grub and lilo require a legacy BIOS.
-Steve
Well, u could put grub or lilo on flash, either of them works with linuxbios. The space may be big tight though.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but I don't understand how you do this. Grub and lilo require a legacy BIOS.
LinuxBIOS + ADLO + BOCHS BIOS + ( LILO | GRUB )
Adam, who's for time beeing been (stolen|borrowed|reassigned) to wireless group.
Well, u could put grub or lilo on flash, either of them works with linuxbios. The space may be big tight though.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but I don't understand how
you do this.
Grub and lilo require a legacy BIOS.
LinuxBIOS + ADLO + BOCHS BIOS + ( LILO | GRUB )
Adam
Seems like a lot of complexity, and I am kind of a zealot against real mode. Has anyone considered writing the disk/video interface for Grub, to replace the BIOS calls? Looking at the Grub code the BIOS calls seem pretty isolated, and most of the code (I think) is already in linuxbios in some form or another (although vga is there for only a couple of boards right now). I for one would like a general bootloader, and Grub is pretty neat.
-Steve
LinuxBIOS + ADLO + BOCHS BIOS + ( LILO | GRUB )
Seems like a lot of complexity, and I am kind of a zealot against real mode. Has anyone considered writing the disk/video interface for Grub, to replace the BIOS calls? Looking at the Grub code the BIOS calls seem pretty isolated, and most of the code (I think) is already in linuxbios in some form or another (although vga is there for only a couple of boards right now). I for one would like a general bootloader, and Grub is pretty neat.
Yes. I agree it is complex. We have given it fairly a bit of though and if you want to support legacy applications then it is pretty much about the only way to do this.
Sure we could go LinuxBIOS version of grub, but unless you add "legacy application support" it won't help you with booting anything else other than linux. So while it may fit with your particular problem, usefullness of such hack won't be as big as one could expect.
Yes. I agree it is complex. We have given it fairly a bit of though and if you want to support legacy applications then it is pretty much about the only way to do this.
Sure we could go LinuxBIOS version of grub, but unless you add "legacy application support" it won't help you with booting anything else other than linux. So while it may fit with your particular problem, usefullness of such hack won't be as big as one could expect.
-- Adam Sulmicki
Well, I certainly did not mean to imply ADLO or BOCHS was complex unnecessarily. These are brilliant developments that greatly advance the capabilities of the open source community.
My point was that I am only focused on booting linux, and so the legacy BIOS is just flash baggage after linux gets going. Grub offers some booting flexibility that I need, and since it is C code, also is more easily customized for some other things I need to do during boot (embedded application). So the interest in a non-BIOS adaptation (I prefer that word to "hack"). It doesn't really matter to me if it has wide interest or not, as long as it solves my purposes and doesn't take too long to do and isn't really stupid for some reason or other. I just wanted to see if it was already done or there was a giant flaw in my thinking. Based on a previous post, perhaps the tiara project may have already done it, so I am going to check that out.
Thanks for your excellent work on ADLO and mods to BOCHS-BIOS.
-Steve
My point was that I am only focused on booting linux, and so the legacy BIOS is just flash baggage after linux gets going. Grub offers some booting flexibility that I need, and since it is C code, also is more easily customized for some other things I need to do during boot (embedded application).
Linuxbios + Etherboot, surely?
You can give the command line by hand from the serial console or via DHCP. Start off with the NFS root, administered remotely. Then populate the disk and for subsequent disk boots, Etherboot has an IDE driver. No direct support for SCSI controllers, but I think you'll be hard pressed to get that without legacy BIOS.
Eric Biederman ported Etherboot directly to LinuxBIOS, so no legacy BIOS needed. It's mostly C and Ken Yap is talking about embedding lua (www.lua.org), so now would be a good time to talk about what customisation you need.
prl-linuxbios@sychron.com writes:
My point was that I am only focused on booting linux, and so the legacy BIOS is just flash baggage after linux gets going. Grub offers some booting flexibility that I need, and since it is C code, also is more easily customized for some other things I need to do during boot (embedded application).
Linuxbios + Etherboot, surely?
You can give the command line by hand from the serial console or via DHCP. Start off with the NFS root, administered remotely. Then populate the disk and for subsequent disk boots, Etherboot has an IDE driver. No direct support for SCSI controllers, but I think you'll be hard pressed to get that without legacy BIOS.
And you can set LinuxBIOS options to say you want to boot off of the network of off of local IDE.
As for SCSI if you want it writing an etherboot driver should not be too bad...
Eric Biederman ported Etherboot directly to LinuxBIOS, so no legacy BIOS needed. It's mostly C and Ken Yap is talking about embedding lua (www.lua.org), so now would be a good time to talk about what customisation you need.
I think that is mostly with regards to network loaded code, from mknbi/mkelfImage or similiar.
Eric
Grub offers some booting flexibility that I need, and since it is C code, also is more easily customized for some other things I need to do during boot (embedded application).
Linuxbios + Etherboot, surely?
I missed this reply earlier because my mail server died :-(.
Couple of Q's about etherboot: Does it support the text vga screen/keyboard without a legacy BIOS? I am not clear on how you specify the boot drive, maybe -DDEFAULT_BOOTFILE=/dev/hda? Can it boot Linux from a particular partition (/dev/hda1) or only from the beginning of the disk (I assume scanning for an elfimage)? My product must boot without a network connection, and requires vga console/keyboard.
-Steve
On Sat, Feb 01, 2003 at 12:10:25PM -0800, Steve M. Gehlbach wrote:
Maybe I'm missing something here, but I don't understand how you do this. Grub and lilo require a legacy BIOS.
LinuxBIOS + ADLO + BOCHS BIOS + ( LILO | GRUB )
Seems like a lot of complexity, and I am kind of a zealot against real mode. Has anyone considered writing the disk/video interface for Grub, to replace the BIOS calls?
The tiara project has done this. Made a version of grub that didn't need the legacy BIOS that is. http://sourceforge.net/projects/utcboot/
//Peter
Hello --
I am getting ready to create a student Bochs development environment including the latest uClibc-only env and Busybox.
uClibc and Busybox are easy.. but where do I get kernels ??
Or more useful -- where do I get config files and LinuxBIOS compile instructions and standards ??
Thx, John
Is this assuming you have booted linux, or you want to boot linux from a bootloader that you give a command line option to?
I actually implemented a little mod to linux that lets you modify the command line as it boots up, if you hit (e.g.) a space bar at the right time. I found no interest in the Linux community, but it is a trivial thing to write.
ron
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Adam Sulmicki -
ebiederman＠lnxi.com -
John Allen -
John van Vlaaderen -
Peter Stuge -
prl-linuxbios＠sychron.com -
Ronald G. Minnich -
Steve M. Gehlbach