Just a quick status report. After looking at the code that
preliminary patch to put ehterboot into linuxBIOS, I decided to check
to see how hard it would be to simply reuse therboot whole.
Making a valid ELF image from etherboot is simple. One already
exists but it has a 16bit entry point. So all I had to do was
write another version of start32.S
Quite a few of the routines in start32.S I simply removed because
I don't have any 16bit BIOS calls. Of the rest only currticks was
a challenge. I hacked up an implementation based on rdtsc, and the
linux fast_gettimeoffset code, which should work on everything better
than a 486. The patch to linuxBIOS had an implementation which was
very specific to the SiS 630 chipsets, using an ACPI timer.
Sizewise linuxBIOS for the AMD762 chipset and etherboot for the
eepro100 fit into about 48k. I'm not packing them into the rom that
tight currently because it is tricky to pack them. But that is a
detail that should be easy to overcome.
Does anyone know what it would take to get etherboot up on the:
3Com PCI 3c980 Cyclone?
In linux I can just use the 3c59x driver?
Anyway I'll see if I can get a good patch out in the next couple of
days. I did a number of silly things including starting with a very
hacked up version already (my patches to 5.01 ) and I hardcoded the
ram size. Plus I tried to figure out what if getting the 3COM driver
up was as simple as adding it PCI id somewhere.
Eric
