Bill Arbaugh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> >
> > O.k. If the goal is booting over the network, I currently have a
> > netboot package that does dhcp and tftp. And downloads a kernel over
> > the kernel and boots it. The ramdisk compressed was only 10k, last
> > time I looked.
> >
> Is this the package formally known as etherboot? Or is it something you
> wrote?
I half wrote. I stole dhcp & tftp code from other projects and repackaged
it. I can switch between it and etherboot. I'll probably wind
up naming my package nbc, just so I don't use a name that is already
used.
It's up on ftp://ftp.linuxnetorx.com/pub/linuxBIOS/netboot-1.2.tar.gz
> Adam Agnew is looking into a Linux kernel where they claim to have it down
> to ~180KB. No idea what version it is yet. We've pretty much come to the
> conclusion that we'll have to use an older kernel to get below
> 256KB. Fortunately, I don't think it will matter much.
Hmm. We will have to prefix it with a bigger stub to enable hardware
if we are running directly out of linuxBIOS but otherwise we should be
o.k. Though I don't know what kind of driver issues we will have.
As the driver API tends to be backported to older kernels we can
probably run more recent drivers.
> We should coordinate. We're just getting started here since it takes time
> in a University to get things. But, we're hoping to start making some
> real progress now that we have everything on hand.
Fine take a look at what I have... In the next week or so I should be
doing a very thorough write up of my netbooting file format. It's
expressed in code in my kexec pages at:
ftp://ftp.linuxnetworx.com/pub/linuxBIOS/kexec-patches-1.0.tar.gz
and my recent work on linuxBIOS.
For x86 it's very similiar to mulitiboot execpt for the parameter
format, and some added restrictions on where the ELF program header
goes to make it friendly on embedded bootstrap programs. The
multiboot format that GRUB uses is not extensible which is a problem.
My code for alpha should be out shortly it's just a matter of cleaning
it up.
Anyway if you have any feedback let me know.
Eric
