[OpenBIOS] OpenBIOS as an intermediate loader

Mark Morgan Lloyd markMLl.openbios at telemetry.co.uk
Sun Nov 2 18:19:56 CET 2008


Paul Brook wrote:
>> There is no ARM support though unless you want to do it. I also have
>> an ARM machine, so at least I could try to compile.
> 
> In practice almost no ARM machines use OpenFirmware, and ARM kernels have 
> their own bootloader interface, so you're better off using something like 
> u-boot.

Thanks Paul. On the other hand installing something like u-boot assumes 
that you know quite a lot about the underlying architecture of the 
board, but if the manufacturer isn't being helpful working out the 
details can be made vastly easier by having interactive tools.

In the current case I've got some boards 
http://www.tri-m.com/products/iei/kamio27012702.html which I'm hoping to 
get into silent Linux servers, they've got CE and eyeballing the 
bootable media (on Compact Flash) suggests that they are very PC-like... 
although I've not done significant reverse-engineering yet. The same 
boards are available with different firmware and with Linux on the CF 
device for about ?170 which we might possibly consider as a way of 
getting the binaries, but they want something like ?500 for the Linux 
toolset and system documentation which they quite simply aren't going to 
get from us.

So despite the fact that these are ARM I can see control going to a 
PC-style MBR, then to the boot sector at the start of a FAT filesystem, 
then to a loader for CE in an understood binary format. Now there's no 
way I can commit myself to any timescale, but if I were able to massage 
OpenBIOS into the same binary format then it might be that it would be 
applicable to other CE devices in addition to these boards which would 
probably be a Good Thing.

I'm going to start off tinkering on an aging x86. This itself might turn 
out to be "fun" since I've already found that GRUB does something to the 
system that screws the kernel- LILO is fine but if possible I'd like to 
bypass both.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]



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