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Re: second-stage bootloader for Thecus N2100?



On Sat, 31 Jan 2009, Loïc Minier wrote:

Not sure what you mean here; if your kernel panics, it just sits here
and doesn't give back control to the boot loader or previous kernel
AFAIK; I don't know whether you can get control back in the kexec case,
but I suspect not in all cases.

Hence the need for shared state. Bootloader twiddles the "boot successful" bit to 0, userspace sets it to 1. If the bootloader sees this bit is 0, it can set the bit and try a fallback (older?) kernel. Increase the number of bits for the number of fallbacks you'd like to try. (Change the sense a bit to make it implementable as a counter).

Presumably there's an easyish way of poking, say, Redboot config variables from Linux userspace?

That said, I think panic behaviour is configurable.

The initramfs idea came later, and we also explored that a little as I mentionned (Oliver's script); kboot and petitboot were existing implementations, petitboot for instance has a graphical menu. But in end, kboot doesn't seem too active and petitboot was a bit too PS3 specific IIRC (but probably decent).

Ok, will check those out. Thanks!

I guess they all depend on kexec though, so we'll need to wait for that to re-appear in debian-ARM.

regards,
--
Paul Jakma	paul@clubi.ie	paul@jakma.org	Key ID: 64A2FF6A
Fortune:
The average nutritional value of promises is roughly zero.

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