ollie lho <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Thu, 2002-09-26 at 09:13, Bari Ari wrote: > > > > > > ollie lho wrote: > > > > >We should start a project call OmniBoot (not OmniBook^TM) which can boot > > >any architecture. > > > > > > > > If the source could be shared it would certainly make sense, instead of > > all this reinventing of the wheel. > > > > Well, I do think there will be a lot of code sharing. As predicted by > Ron, those bootloaders are getting more like OS kernel by itself. With > careful architecting, we can have a portable bootloader.
API wise etherboot is now portable. And people from other architectures have been picking off it's drivers for a while. And the ELF file format is portable across architectures. Where Ron missed in his prediction is the size differences between a regular OS and a bootloader. 16KB vs. 600KB is huge. There still remains a place for multiple bootloaders even if we start getting cross platform bootloaders. Too many people want significantly different semantics. A challenge with some of the embedded stuff is that a number of the embedded architectures are much easier to boot than pc. So it isn't a problem to merge the system setup code and the bootloader. Blob, ppcboot, and armboot all seem to share that property. I do not believe they you can easily swap out ram, or have an interesting pci bus on most of embedded bootloaders I have seen. And while you can do it I don't think putting motherboard information into a generic kernel is the right thing to do either. Eric _______________________________________________ Linuxbios mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.clustermatic.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxbios
