Cyril Plisko <cyril.plisko at gmail.com> wrote:
> As for the choices you've presented - that is exactly the situation
> as we discussed it on this list around a year ago - when the PowerPC
> community was created. Taking the ufsboot route may seem to be the
> quick way to bootstrap the activity, however it has significant
> drawback of requiring working disk driver to be able to move beyond
> the point where the root disk driver chain is being assembled.
> Bearing in mind that PegasosII has ATA disk and the Solaris ATA driver
> isn't opensourced it may be a major showstopper for us. Netboot
We could use a USB disk :-)
> is a obvious alternative as all the components are in current source
> tree and significant similarity between SPARC OBP and Peg' SmartFirmware
> (both are implementations of OpenFirmware) simplifies port to Polaris.
>
> Taking GRUB2 route is very attractive too. Mainly because we can even
> boot from disk in that case - GRUB2 will bring the boot archive from
> the disk and (while not being able to mount the disk) we can boot,
> practically, to the fully operational state of the OS. And network
> root is still an [easy] option. Downside - GRUB2 in its current state
> needs some work to be able to boot Solaris. And Solaris itself needs
> some work too. And then we can add the ATA driver based on the state
> of the whole [S]ATA framework at the moment.
We will not need the ATA driver before we have a shell prompt as
till then we may use the UFS based boot archive that is loaded by
GRUB into memory
> I have strong feeling that GRUB2 way worth being chosen.
>
> As a side note I want to add that Sun's road map (both short- and
> long-term) WRT GRUB in Solaris is totally unclear. I never saw
> that UFS support was submitted to GRUB. And the GRUB itself in Solaris
> stopped at 0.95, while the GRUB itself went ahead to 0.97.
> It would be very beneficial for [our] community if engineers from
> NewBoot Team shared their road map and plans with the rest of us.
I thought that the ufs code was planned to submit back. If it did not
happen yet, does anybody know why?
J?rg
--
EMail:joerg at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) J?rg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
js at cs.tu-berlin.de (uni)
schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
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