On 14 Jun 2001, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> The more I think about it, I keep thinking we could use something
> very small, and limited for the fail safe booting case. So you misflash
> your linux kernel you still have a chance to recover.
Should we consider linking in tiara as the "first level"? Then your
options are "boot linux from flash" etc.
I want to avoid writing our own operating system, which is what these
bioses always turn into sooner or later. Look at Open Boot, SRM, etc.
I also want to avoid what happened to the Sun bootstrap: at some point you
built it by yanking in huge bits of kernel source. Almost but not quite a
kernel.
I actually considered putting TCL in there as the first level boot at one
point ... but the system should always be able to boot with minimal fuss
in the "common case" -- i.e. everything is working.
A point solution that works on one chipset may well grow to very large
size and complexity if ported to lots of chipsets. At the very least we'll
be writing drivers for everything, redoing work already done in linux.
I don't know, this is a tough call.
ron
