LAB question

[Gregg C Levine]

Hello!
As always I am looking at new ideas.
One that has occurred to me on numerous occasions is that of the idea of
using Linux as a boot loader.

I know it has been discussed on several occasions on this list, however I
don't recall what was resolved about it. What has been resolved about it?
And on what machines does it work? (This includes chipsets.)
--
Gregg C Levine [e-mail]
"The Force will be with you always." Obi-Wan Kenobi

[ron minnich]

On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 6:04 PM, Gregg C Levine
 wrote:
> I know it has been discussed on several occasions on this list, however I
> don't recall what was resolved about it. What has been resolved about it?
> And on what machines does it work? (This includes chipsets.)

it works on thousands of machines at LANL and has for 8 years.

It also was used for a short time on OLPC.

LAB has a very long tradition in coreboot, and is the reason the
original name was linuxbios.

ron

[Jordan Crouse]

On 04/11/08 21:04 -0500, Gregg C Levine wrote:
> Hello!
> As always I am looking at new ideas.
> One that has occurred to me on numerous occasions is that of the idea of
> using Linux as a boot loader.
>
> I know it has been discussed on several occasions on this list, however I
> don't recall what was resolved about it. What has been resolved about it?
> And on what machines does it work? (This includes chipsets.)

LAB is still a going concern - we have a number of platforms in
buildrom that can build a LAB payload.  The problem with LAB that
it requires a lot of effort for each platform, so the overall
quality of the LAB payloads depends on if somebody is actively
working that particular platform.  With the progress of the 
kernel and the userland stuff, LAB payloads have a tendency to 
bitrot rather quickly.  New support and development is always
welcome.  You might also want to look at kexecboot:

http://git.linuxtogo.org/?p=thesing/kexecboot.git;a=tree

Which could be a reasonable replacement for the uclibc/busybox/kexec
rootfs in buildrom right now.

Jordan