[OpenBIOS] Bootloader

[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