[Fwd: RE: Etherboot and other things.]

[Eugene.Leitl at lrz.uni-muenchen.de]

-------- Original Message --------
From: "Larry G. Linde" <linde at imageman.com>
Subject: RE: Etherboot and other things.
To: <linuxbios at listman.lanl.gov>

Since there has been a large amount of discussion about many things relating
to:

A: fitting linuxbios into a 256k flash
B: booting via etherboot from same flash.
C: console mode to select different boot images.
D: failover boot if one fails
E: other misc things.

We have a version of many of the items above for the SiS630 chipset. It has
been tested on the matsonic M7308e
And the procomp bst1b motherboards. We have decided to post our latest
efforts to the net a bit early.

It is not really linuxbios but it uses large parts of the linuxbios code
tree with heavy mods.

It not done yet but it does do the following things:

1: Fits in 256k easily. It could fit in 128k with some trimming.
2: boots from any ide device using a std Linux kernel.
3: boot via Ethernet via a port of etherboot
4: has a built in command interp based on forth
5: supports full ext2 access to/from the disk devices for kernel image
selection and other info.
6: supports read AND WRITE to/from the flash device while running. You can
copy a new flash image via the Ethernet and then burn it
   into the flash without removing the part from the MB. (note. Be careful
with this)
7: inits the vga display and kbd devices for a interactive console.
8: reads and writes to/from the nvram to store boot params etc.
9: supports debug params and diag info to/from the serial port. You could
also set the serial port to be the console
   for the boot params.
10: boots a std Linux kernel from disk or Ethernet faster that the display
can power up normally.
11: auto size and setup memory dims
12: init and setup the cpu and bus speed params.
13: deal with power up on power fail modes.
14: we pulled in most everything a normal bios does prior to booting Linux.
So you can use a
     standard kernel image. There are a few things we have not finished yet.
15: we also fully setup the pci bus with mem/io and ints and pass the info
to the kernel in the std bios table format.


It should be easy to take parts of the code and re-wedge it back into
linuxbios.

Our goal is a bit different than the standard linuxbios effort. We do not
want the entire kernel in flash.
We want the ability to boot from a disk or network ie: replace the bios but
work better than an a bios for Linux.

The code will be located starting Monday 5/21/2001 at:

ftp://opensource.talkware.net/pub/tiara

there will be a .tgz with the full source/build directory as well as a .bin
image that can be
put into a 256k flash if you just want to play.

There are many things we are still working on and it's a long way from being
done but it might be of use
For some of the things that have been discussed on the list.

have fun. If you have any questions you can send them to:

tiara at talkware.net

or post to the list we have several people that read it.


-The Talkware tiara group.