Difference between Linxubios native's Elfboot and Linuxbios native's Filo

[Mathieu Deschamps]

Le ven 04/06/2004 à 02:34, Eric W. Biederman a écrit :
> Mathieu Deschamps <mdeschamps at mangrove-systems.com> writes:
> 
> > Hello,
> > 
> > Since i have mostly 'directly choose' Filo, i haven't had
> > much time asking for the difference between Linuxbios native's Elfboot
> > and Linuxbios native's filo. I know you did made some work around
> > theses... 
> 
> The native ``filo'' is scheduled for deletion, it touches hardwaremain
> which it should not.  As implemented it is a maintenance nightmare and
> an implementation of policy and I refuse to support it, in the core of
> LinuxBIOS.  Until just a little while ago I thought it was much less
> intrusive so was not forcing the issue.

ok I understand.

>  
> > (i have read the doc of Sone Takeshi and i have the features of filo.)
> > 
> > Could you explain me what differences there are and/or whether 
> > this one best suited for DoC or CF or other types i'am ignoring ?
> > Please also let me know what type of filesys elfboot boots, and other
> > thing about support
> 
> ELF boot is a minimal loader just good enough to load something real
> out off some device.   ELF boot just grabs an ELF image at the offset
> in a device it is pointed at.  The image can be sparse so it can exist
> with partition tables and filesystems.  The trivial solution is to put
> a partition right after partition table for the ELF image.  More
> interesting forms of coexistance are possible by noone has implemented
> more than a proof of concept.
> 
> If you want to use filo which understand filesystems and partitions
> get the real one. It has been developing faster and it appears to have
> more features.

Ok, this week I'am a bit brain-slowed, so I recap to see if I catch
the whole meaning:

you say that filo shouldn't be inside Linuxbios in the way 
it forces implementation/maintenance that isn't clean.
So that's it : 
letting payload type program to modify 'Linuxbios core' is not
acceptable, is it ?
Then you say, what I can is to adopt the outside filo solution 
'the real one' that has not the above burden, and that have moreover
a lots of feature the inside's filo haven't.

(I have made a tool lbcc to build, to configure a rom and I
 seek also it to do the payload whatever is your payload program.
 But i felt troubled by coding the 'payload maker' because i hadn't
 clearly seen the "2 filos" even if I felt them.) 

Thanks for the explaination but.. err i still can't make myself answer
to theses questions.

-Can ELF boot onto CF , DoC or even CDROM and others instead of normal
hard disk ?
-Can it boot kernel from ext2, ext3, iso9660 or others ?
-Can it understand image like bzImage or others?

You see I would like to make truely a list of payload solutions in a
tab, and to tick whatever this solution or this other can this or that.
So that somebody's look on my tab, can say "-ok, this is my solution for
my build config, and it handles that filesys, support that image format"

mathieu




> Eric
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