Ronald G Minnich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Ollie
>
> I think your message got chopped off. Were you saying that linuxbios could
> host the tiara forth code, i.e. boot sequence is linuxbios loads tiara,
> then tiara loads linux?
>
> One thing I do want to preserve is the ability to boot linux out of flash.
> I am working now with the Alpha cluster that uses linuxbios+scyld to do
> this and it is quite heavenly. I am going to have something like 1024 or
> more machines which need to boot with no user interaction at all. Also,
> there is some exotic hardware here that I want my bootstrap to use on
> boot, such as Myrinet, GigaNet, Gig-E, SCI, and Quadrics; I would rather
> use the Linux drivers for these than write ones for tiara, not to mention
> the problem of non-bootp-style boot protocols.
Ron why is a non-bootp necessary. Don't most of those interconnects
have a mode where you can run ip over them? Admittedly these aren't
the packets you want running in your high speed application but for
the less interesting things running ip traffic is probably easier
to get a fully functional machine.
> So maybe what I'd like to have as options:
>
> 1. linuxbios -> tiara -> boot linux from flash
> 2. linuxbios -> boot linux from flash
> 3. linuxbios -> tiara -> interact with tiara, boot os of choice
> (including flash as an option)
> 4. linuxbios -> boot linux from flash ->
> interact with tiara embedded in linux -> boot os of choice
>
> That last option is kind of interesting to me. It gets all the linux
> drivers, network protocols, and file systems while also allowing the
> option of a tiara-style interactive boot. Can tiara be embedded in linux?
>
> comments?
Ron. This kind of interaction I have made the elf boot loader. Then
to support all of these all we need to do is make tiara an ELF image that
can boot directly from linuxBIOS. The last part of this work that isn't
finished is a set of parameters that describe the motherboard, to pass
to a loaded image, I plan on working on this next month as I stablize
linuxBIOS on the dual-athlon board. What I'm hoping to build is
something like ACPI that doesn't need an interpreter.
Larry I have yet to look at tiara but does make it compile into
an ELF image and then have the core linuxBIOS code start tiara sound
like a reasonable thing to do?
My imagination says it should look more like:
1. linuxbios -> boot wrapped kernel from flash
2. linuxbios-> tiara -> (interact and if not go into default mode) and
boot kernel from a device.
As far as a smart boot loader in linux this sounds good. I don't
have a problem with that. I already have a stupid boot loader that
runs on linux and making it smarter should not be too hard. It is
just a matter of some work.
Anyway back to setting up my interrupt routing tables.
Eric
