"Eric W. Biederman" wrote:
> "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.
>
I have used RedHat 6.2 Alpha out of the box so to speak. It comes with MILO
to boot Linux on an EV4:
the Multia/UDB. It runs fine using MILO boot floppies or harddisk (scsi only -
ide has problems just now - interrupt sticks when drive plugged it) from ARC
console. It's not called noname as I recall, but rather udb (I think)
Note that aboot/SRM console gives me problems with
fpu instructions - i suspect pal code problems.
Anyhow... a first step might be to get MILO working in flash on this system...
it's one of the few that can't do this right now... partly because the flash
parts
must be erased/reprogrammed a whole chip at a time (there are three) - there
is no nvram code in MILO's fmu utility that supports this system/flash chip.
Intel's flash part's docs are available, so in southbridge (if you look real
hard), etc,
but nobody knows what GPIO pins go to the write enable/erase pulse/etc on the
flash parts.
If anyone has a way to do this it would take us past the barrier I ran into when
I
tried to do this a while ago. (IE ... docs about how to program the flash, and
what
headers the SROM wants to see to be able to run a ARC/SRM console/MILO/linuxbios
etc from the flash.
there is the SRM/ARC/NT firmware flash utility.... but what format of files does
it take?
>
> 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 believe if MILO can be made to work, linuxbios should be trivial.
>
>
> 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.
As I mentioned above, do you have the docs for SROM, Console
firmware image headers, NT flash utility binary file format, etc?
It's not to hard to get ALL the chip docs, but the firmware/circuit board?
>
>
> Eric
