Re: booting/installing debian-alpha
On Thursday, 11 Jun, Kristoffer.Rose@ens-lyon.fr wrote:
>
> Just to make it clear:
>
> (1) booting an alpha off a CD-ROM does *not* use the boot block but rather
> exploits that one can inform the alpha's boot-loader (SRM or AlphaBIOS)
> which file (on a FAT or ISO9660 file system) to load. The program thus
> loaded is called MILO and is, from a CD-ROM perspective, "just a file".
To the best of my knowledge, SRM doesn't know any filesystems, it can
only boot from a bootblock. That is, if MILO resides in a filesystem,
it must occupy sequential blocks and the placement information (starting
block no. and MILO size in blocks) must be written into block 0 to make
it SRM-bootable.
The problem is that it is not known which MILO image the bootblock
should point at. At the moment I'm trying to figure out if it is
possible to autodetect system type with enough confidence so that a
small bootloader could be put between SRM and MILO (a la linload.exe)
to load the appropriate MILO image. Well, anyway, after all it can
always ask the user which MILO to boot... I'm afraid I won't have it
ready really soon (may take a couple of days), so feel free to burn
unbootable CDs. Most people use ARC/AlphaBIOS anyway.
>
> (2) Alphas come in a large number of variants THAT REQUIRE DIFFERENT
> KERNELS. This is what I meant with <subarchitecture> in my proposal.
> The following <subarchitecture>s are known to me (we might not be able
> to support them all in an initial release):
>
> alcor, alcor-s, alphabook1-s, avanti-s, cab, cab-s, dp264-s, eb164,
> eb64p, eb66, eb66p, jensen-s, lx164, miata, miata-s, mikasa-s,
> mikasa-s-5, noname, noritake-s, noritake-s-5, pc164, rawhide-s,
> sable-s, sable-s-5, sx164, takara, and xl.
What do these -s stand for? I have a feeling that they do not
constitute different system types, but rather mark kernels built for
boot via SRM (as opposed to MILO). As we do not seem to support direct
boot from SRM (we're going via MILO anyway), the actual number of
"subarchitectures" is sligthly less. Kernels existing only in -s
flavours are either independent of this SRM/MILO issue, or not supported
by MILO at all.
>
> The generic files for booting:
>
> /boot/linload.exe (not a symlink)
> /boot/base2_0.tgz
> /boot/root.bin
> /boot/drv1440.bin
I'm afraid modules may be system type dependent.
Nikita
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