Disclaimer: I could easily have botched the answers to your questions. Maybe someone will know the best way to load Linux from Uboot, but I don't.
I've found that people more readily correct misinformation than volunteer information, so I hope this gets you somewhere :) > I suppose I have a couple of questions to start of with that I hope > someone here can answer: The best answer to your questions is probably something like: It depends on your boot loader. Coreboot initializes the hardware and then loads its payload. That payload could be a BIOS (SeaBIOS), a boot loader (FILO, Grub, Linux-As-Bootloader, elfboot...), a Linux kernel, memtest, coreinfo, ... This gives you the flexibility to load the kernel over the network, from a disk... You can check out buildrom to see how some payloads are built. It gets out of date quickly, but it is faster than starting from scratch. > 0) Is there a good repository of information regarding embedded Linux > in the x86 (not PC!!!!) architecture I would choose a boot loader and go from there. > 1) The boot-loader (both U-Boot and coreboot) put the x86 staight into > Protected Mode - Does the CPU need to be put back into Real Mode > before entering the Linux Kernel (in order to allow the Kernel to put > the CPU into Protected Mode) Our terminology is conflicting here, since we don't call Coreboot a boot-loader, but hopefully what I'm saying still makes sense. The boot-loader will do this if it needs to. > 2) Which Kernel image should I use (vmlinux, vmlinux.bin, bzImage etc) > 3) Can I copy the compiled Kernel image directly into RAM simply perform > a 'Jump' into it > 5) Can I run x86 Linux without needed any kind of BIOS emulation? > 4) Are these the right questions to ask? Are there 'better' questions I > should be asking? If you want to use Coreboot, the first question is probably "Which bootloader do I want to use?" All the rest will be answered by the documentation for that bootloader. Thanks, Myles -- coreboot mailing list: [email protected] http://www.coreboot.org/mailman/listinfo/coreboot
