Hello Koen,
Thursday, December 13, 2007, 9:09:07 AM, you wrote:
[]
>>
>> During last few months, myself and other contributors worked on
>> bootloading solution which would satisfy the following criteria:
>>
>> 1. Implemented as a Linux-based user-space application, taking
>> advantage of of the contemporary technologies, such as early userspace
>> configuration and initramfs.
>> 1. Light-weight and modular.
>> 2. Easily extensible.
>> 3. Small size.
>> 4. Machine-independent.
>> 5. Supports booting from flash devices, disk partitions, loopback
>> images, and NFS, to start with.
> Great! Shall we put this on the TODO for the 2008 release next to
> overhauling the initscripts?
As a standard solution for bootloading, sure. However, I'd like to
use it for PocketPC boxes for 2007 too, as there simply no other way
to provide user-friendly way of Angstrom installing/booting otherwise.
To recount issues faced, fully based on the actual support experience:
1. PocketPCs don't have consistent support for flash booting, the most
common denominator of booting is using adhoc bootloader from WinCE
environment, and from an external media card.
2. Most PocketPC users are obviously Windows users, with hands tied in
selection of native tools for disk management, and laziness/FUD
regarding use of other solutions (e.g. Linux LiveCDs).
3. Latest Windows versions treat media cards as removal storage in the
sense of floppy disks, they are: 1) formatted as raw disk space, e.g.
w/o a partition table; 2) Native OS partition manager doesn't allow to
repartion a card.
4. There were attempts to provide an installer capable of resizing
card partitions and creates ext2 partition, but due to partitionless
issue above, it didn't really solve the problem.
So, based on all this, the conclusion can be made that the most
problem-free solution for now would be to use loopback-mounted ext2
images as means to install Angstrom on an arbitrary PocketPC device.
Specifically:
1. Provide ext2.gz images of suitable size (~60M would be good IMHO).
2. With the recent "bootbundle" technology of HaRET, provide single
bootloader executable, ineternally containing kernel and
initramfs-bootmenu-image.
So, user would need to download 2 files, uncompress one of
them, copy them to a card, and voila, Angstrom installed. More
advanced users can install to a dedicated card partition or to a
non-OS flash partition, and still use the same bootloader. The most
advanced users will be still able to replace 1st stage bootloader on
selected models, but longer-term solution is to still using
initramfs-bootmenu-image as a 2nd-stage, regardless of 1st-stage
bootloader (be it HaRET, hative Z bootloader, HH.org bootloader,
U-boot, or something else).
I've uploaded bunch of the aforementioned Angstrom-boot
executable to unsupported-images, so the RFC here is move them to the
images/ from now on.
P.S.
This all is in addition to LiveRamdisks, which are still in topic, of
course.
> regards,
> Koen
--
Best regards,
Paul mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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