On 1/5/06, Joerg Schilling <schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de> wrote:
> 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 :-)
Oh, that's ... innovative ! :)
>
> > 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
Exactly. That's the idea.
--
Regards,
Cyril
