[LinuxBIOS] Problems booting off Epia MII compact flash (filo)

[John Koleszar]

Peter Stuge wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 05, 2007 at 09:36:50PM -0500, John Koleszar wrote:
>   
>> When trying to boot off of the onboard CF (hde)
>>     
>
> [..]
>
>   
>> My filo Config and a complete debug log is attached. I suspect that
>> my problem is with my filo build rather than linuxbios
>>     
>
> There was no way to both use the CF slot as a boot device in FILO,
> and as the root device for the kernel when I was working on the MII
> back in September. I spent some time on it but did not see a simple
> solution.
>
> Linux did not like the Ricoh bridge when set up so that FILO could
> use it.
>
> While hacking on this problem Linux or FILO would just give errors
> when trying to talk to the card. There are documented problems with
> the Ricoh bridge. (2.6 PCMCIA HOWTO/FAQ)
>
> I decided to work around the problem and got a CF->IDE adapter so
> that the CF is hda.
>
>   
Interesting. I'll be sure to post my notes if and when I do get it 
working then. I'd still like to keep hacking on this, as it's a far more 
elegant solution than going the adapter route. I was under the 
impression that it worked by preventing the kernel from probing for ide2 
so that it wouldn't overwrite the config done by linuxbios, but I 
obviously haven't gotten that far yet. As for my current issue, I just 
read something that leads me to believe that I need to disable PCI 
support in filo, but I won't be able to try until later tonight.

My environment right now consists of flashrom and my rom image on my CF 
card, which I access from a gentoo livecd. I can't get El-Torito boot 
working either (same issue as this[1] thread), so my development cycles 
are pretty long atm.

[1] http://linuxbios.org/pipermail/linuxbios/2007-January/018102.html

Thanks for the heads up.

John