"Carr, Bill" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Hello Eric,
>
> My name is Bill Carr. I work for the Alpha Servers Benchmark Performance
> Engineering group at Compaq. I noticed your note in the linuxbios mail
> archive regarding your success in booting linux from linux. From what I
> have read, booting linux from linux sounds like the LOBOS portion of the
> effort. Is that correct? Since you refer to " ... what appears to be a SRM
> bug', can I conclude that you are not trying to replace SRM?
The kexec stuff (yes it evolved from lobos) is independant of bootloader.
It works under milo as well.
Kexec is necessary to boot a secondary kernel. It just isn't smart
to update your flash everytime a new kernel comes out.
> As a project of personal interest, I am exploring what it would take to boot
> an old EV4 multia (UDB/NoName) directly from the flash. I believe I have
> enough tools to program the flash ROM. I was wondering if you, or anyone
> else, had successfully gotten linuxbios working on the alpha?
I'm now looking at it. The EV4 NoName is noticeably differet from the
DS10 that I have so we can't share to much code, but we can share
support code.
Do you have a working milo bootloader? If so all of the hard lifting
has been done and you only need to rearrange and test the code. Grr
looking at the kernel source it doesn't look like there is a milo for
the noname.
The boot order for alpha should be:
SROM (which does memory setup) -> (linuxBIOS code in flash rom) ->
Linux kernel.
The linuxBIOS code will need to do the following things:
load palcode.
Setup some devices??
jump to linux.
What you will end up with is pretty much milo on steroids. :)
I'm working on this right now, as a time filler. I happen to have
all of the alpha docs I need and I don't have the docs I want for
other boards.
Eric
