[coreboot] CoreBoot and Payloads

[Eric W. Biederman]

ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> writes:

> On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 7:55 AM, Peter Stuge <peter at stuge.se> wrote:
>> Piotr Brostovski wrote:
>>> I'm asking myself if it is possible that mkelfImage simply isn't
>>> compatible with current gPXE releases?
>>
>> mkelfImage is strictly for Linux.
>>
>> Upstream gPXE can not be built for coreboot, but here is a web page
>> with some information that may still be useful:
>>
>
> I'm puzzled about that. Was gPXE derived from etherboot and, if so,
> why did they drop support?

Yes etherboot transformed into gpxe. To achieve their goals
in gpxe it took something very similar to a complete rewrite.
Sort of like the linuxbios v1 to linuxbios v2 transition.

> If not, how bad does it look to add coreboot support the way Eric
> added it for etherboot?

There are two ways this is interesting.

1) Integrate SeaBIOS and gpxe.  Which will nicely add pxe booting
support to SeaBIOS in the ``BIOS'' way.  
   This should be almost trivial as this is the mode gpxe is designed
   to be run in.

2) As a pure linuxBIOS payload that will work on multiple
   architectures.  If we care about non-x86 non-SEABIOS there are the
   patches that were listed, and you can find where the linuxBIOS
   support was removed in the repository so anyone who wants a start
   can see what the code used to look like.

Eric