On 11/2/08, Mark Morgan Lloyd markMLl.openbios@telemetry.co.uk wrote:
Please excuse the stupid question, but is it possible- or even remotely feasible- to load OpenBIOS from disc in lieu of an operating system kernel?
I use a number of architectures here including PCs and Sun systems. Recently I got my hands on some ARM boards which are flashed for CE but should also in principle be able to run Linux.
Now these CE boards boot in a very PC-like fashion, so I presume they have something similar to a PC BIOS in Flash. If it were possible to load a variant of OpenBIOS as an intermediate loader then it should be possible to use that to load Linux, this approach would also be valuable for engineering purposes on both PCs and other systems which did not have OpenBIOS in Flash.
With some work, it should be possible. Especially the Sun version has been on my TODO (Real machine test with special entry.S).
There is no ARM support though unless you want to do it. I also have an ARM machine, so at least I could try to compile.