Re: booting/installing debian-alpha
Dear Nikita,
> 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.
Sorry, I was thinking about AlphaBIOS booting (which is the only one I
know). AlphaBIOS *does* know about file systems, at least FAT and ISO9660
ones.
Does SRM know how to boot off a CD-ROM at all?
> 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.
The most logical place to put this would be in linload: here we can use
BIOS calls to support an option that means "read the MILO image" instead of
the default being using the argument string as the MILO directory or image
(as it is done currently).
Then booting linload.exe will do the trick - there is just one linload.exe,
right? (Assuming it works with SRM, of course, which I don't know.)
> 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.
Indeed. My only experience is for PWD500a/au which has the same firmware
and thus always "both" AlphaBIOS and SRM available.
>> /boot/drv1440.bin
>
> I'm afraid modules may be system type dependent.
Certainly. But for the moment this is not so: in fact drv1440.bin contains
basically nothing but it being an image means it wastes 1.4M anyway.
Cheers,
Kristoffer
--
Kristoffer Høgsbro Rose, Ph.D., prof.associé <Kristoffer.Rose@ENS-Lyon.FR>
Laboratoire de l'Informatique du Parallélisme équipe PLUME, bureau LR5-026
Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon; 46, Allée d'Italie; F-69364 Lyon 07 cedex
phone: +33(0)4 7272 8642; fax:...8080 <http://www.ens-lyon.fr/~krisrose>
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-alpha-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org
Reply to: