Bootloader

[Alex Owen]

I have been watching this project from the early days and I'm impressed
with the recient progress.

This is probably old news but a quick search of the archives here did not
show anything up.

Yaboot.
Yaboot is the bootloader used by owners of macintosh and other ppc
machines with open firmware to boot linux from openfirmware. The home page
seems to be http://penguinppc.org/projects/yaboot/

Perhaps when the time comes to boot an operating system with openbios
yaboot and linux will be good candidates.

Of course I may be completely off track!

Bye for now
Alex Owen

[Torsten Duwe]

On Monday 05 January 2004 21:02, Alex Owen wrote:

  Yaboot.
 Yaboot is the bootloader used by owners of macintosh and other ppc
 machines with open firmware to boot linux from openfirmware. The home page
 seems to be http://penguinppc.org/projects/yaboot/

 Perhaps when the time comes to boot an operating system with openbios
 yaboot and linux will be good candidates.

 Of course I may be completely off track!
Don't worry, only slightly ;-)

Yes, I boot my workstation in the office with yaboot, and indeed the path is 
openfirmware->yaboot->ELF-kernel(in an ext2fs).
As you can see yaboot mediates between the openfirmware, ignorant of ext2fs, 
and the linux kernel. I haven't checked whether the firmware can launch ELF.

By now ELF seems to be the format of choice already for anything surrounding 
OpenBIOS, so no problem with that. All that's left is (readonly!) ext2fs 
code, as in FILO or GrUB (or yaboot :-); and as one can see in these 
projects, it's not such a big deal. We'll probably see a forth version of an 
ext2fs well before someone seriously starts using yaboot.

	Torsten

[Samuel Rydh]

On Mon, Jan 05, 2004 at 08:02:21PM +0000, Alex Owen wrote:
  I have been watching this project from the early days
and I'm impressed
 with the recient progress.
 
 This is probably old news but a quick search of the archives here did not
 show anything up.
 
 Yaboot.
 Yaboot is the bootloader used by owners of macintosh and other ppc
 machines with open firmware to boot linux from openfirmware. The home page
 seems to be http://penguinppc.org/projects/yaboot/
 
 Perhaps when the time comes to boot an operating system with openbios
 yaboot and linux will be good candidates.
Hehe... this is already working.

I've been merging the Mac-on-Linux mini-OpenFirmware (which did not
parse forth code but provided all the client interface callbacks
as well as filesystem support) with OpenBIOS. There are still some things
to do but overall the merge is pretty much finished.

The latest OpenBIOS version is capable of booting both yaboot (and Linux)
and MacOS 9. MOL is actually close to a perfect platform for developing
OpenBIOS (well, at least for non-POST stuff).

For those who want to take a look at the merged code, everything
is in a BitKeeper repository (bk://openbios.bkbits.net/unstable).

/Samuel

[ron minnich]

On Tue, 6 Jan 2004, Samuel Rydh wrote:

  Perhaps when
the time comes to boot an operating system with openbios
 yaboot and linux will be good candidates.
 
 Hehe... this is already working.
 
 I've been merging the Mac-on-Linux mini-OpenFirmware (which did not
 parse forth code but provided all the client interface callbacks
 as well as filesystem support) with OpenBIOS. There are still some things
 to do but overall the merge is pretty much finished.
what is interesting is that linuxbios works on PPC. 

So a full linuxbios->openbios->your code exists, if anyone wants to put it 
together, that would be all open-source.

ron

[Stefan Reinauer]

* Torsten Duwe <duwe(a)lst.de> [040106 02:20]:
  Yes, I boot my workstation in the office with yaboot,
and indeed the path is 
 openfirmware->yaboot->ELF-kernel(in an ext2fs).
 As you can see yaboot mediates between the openfirmware, ignorant of ext2fs, 
 and the linux kernel. I haven't checked whether the firmware can launch ELF.
 
  By now ELF seems to be the format of choice already
for anything surrounding 
 OpenBIOS, so no problem with that. All that's left is (readonly!) ext2fs 
 code, as in FILO or GrUB (or yaboot :-); and as one can see in these 
 projects, it's not such a big deal. We'll probably see a forth version of an 
 ext2fs well before someone seriously starts using yaboot.
For code reusability the forth-c bindings have been advanced during the
big mol-openbios merger and there is support written in C for HFS and
HFS+ in the tree. Once the tree works fine again for all builds it
should be easy to add for example grub-fs bindings to openbios to reuse
grub's filesystem drivers.

Stefan

[Stefan Reinauer]

* ron minnich <rminnich(a)lanl.gov> [040106 04:15]:
  what is interesting is that linuxbios works on PPC. 
 
 So a full linuxbios->openbios->your code exists, if anyone wants to put it 
 together, that would be all open-source.
Everything that is needed has already been merged into the OpenBIOS tree
(currently only in BK, not in CVS)
The ppc architecture code of OpenBIOS already has a dummy target for an
MPC107 board, like the Embedded Planet EP405pc which is supported by
LinuxBIOS. It probably needs some fiddling to get everything working on
real hardware, but we're really close now..
If somebody wants to look at this, please do!

Stefan

[Samuel Rydh]

On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 03:24:55PM +0100, Stefan Reinauer wrote:
  * ron minnich <rminnich(a)lanl.gov> [040106
04:15]:
  what is interesting is that linuxbios works on
PPC. 
 
 So a full linuxbios->openbios->your code exists, if anyone wants to put it 
 together, that would be all open-source.
 
 Everything that is needed has already been merged into the OpenBIOS tree
 (currently only in BK, not in CVS)
 The ppc architecture code of OpenBIOS already has a dummy target for an
 MPC107 board, like the Embedded Planet EP405pc which is supported by
 LinuxBIOS. It probably needs some fiddling to get everything working on
 real hardware, but we're really close now..
 If somebody wants to look at this, please do!
I actually have the MPC107 board I added that target for (a PowerPC 750 CPU
on a PCI card). I wrote the POST stuff for it some time ago so it should
be simple enough to get OpenBIOS running on it.

/Samuel

[Stefan Reinauer]

* Samuel Rydh <samuel(a)ibrium.se> [040106 15:37]:
  Everything
that is needed has already been merged into the OpenBIOS tree
 (currently only in BK, not in CVS)
 The ppc architecture code of OpenBIOS already has a dummy target for an
 MPC107 board, like the Embedded Planet EP405pc which is supported by
 LinuxBIOS. It probably needs some fiddling to get everything working on
 real hardware, but we're really close now..
 If somebody wants to look at this, please do!
 
 I actually have the MPC107 board I added that target for (a PowerPC 750 CPU
 on a PCI card). I wrote the POST stuff for it some time ago so it should
 be simple enough to get OpenBIOS running on it.
  
We still need a PCI driver though to get FCode supported components to
really work

Stefan

[Samuel Rydh]

On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 03:41:13PM +0100, Stefan Reinauer wrote:
  * Samuel Rydh <samuel(a)ibrium.se> [040106
15:37]:
 
Everything that is needed has already been merged into the OpenBIOS tree
 (currently only in BK, not in CVS)
 The ppc architecture code of OpenBIOS already has a dummy target for an
 MPC107 board, like the Embedded Planet EP405pc which is supported by
 LinuxBIOS. It probably needs some fiddling to get everything working on
 real hardware, but we're really close now..
 If somebody wants to look at this, please do!
 
 I actually have the MPC107 board I added that target for (a PowerPC 750 CPU
 on a PCI card). I wrote the POST stuff for it some time ago so it should
 be simple enough to get OpenBIOS running on it.
   
 We still need a PCI driver though to get FCode supported components to
 really work
Actually, in this particular case this is not really needed. The board
is not supposed to access other PCI devices since that would interfere
with the main system.

One has to write a custom drivers though (a simple tty driver for instance)
and eventually a video driver (the card can access main memory so one just needs
to reserve a piece of main memory and write a linux side client to
display it). It is even possible to bus master directly to the VGA
card although one would have to be a bit careful with locking issues etc.

Btw. MOL fully emulates the PCI bus (including BAR relocation and
FCODE roms) so it should be simple enough to test the PCI (when
implemented) in MOL.

/Samule