Partial success with bootstrapping mipsel

[Martin Schulze <joey@kyllikki.infodrom.north.de>]

Hi,

this is a partial success report about bootstrapping a mipsel
machine.

We've booted the machine using BOOTP/TFTP.

The trick is to add the initial ramdisk directly to the kernel which
is fetched via tftp.  A "regular" mipsel box should be able to boot a
16MB kernel.  Our initrd was 10MB large uncompressed, 2.9MB
compressed.

After booting, the kernel recognizes the compressed ramdisk image and
boots it.  Unfortunately afterwards busybox was hanging after it
displayed its initial message "Busybox 0.xx booting ...".  I guess
there is some realistic hope to get the remaining integration done in
time for woody.

For Anthony: Woglinde has walked a different path with an NFS-Root
install which also works until a certain step, which also looks
promising.

That means, that binary-mips has hope (Woglinde), and binary-mipsel
has hope as well (Karsten).

Regards,

	Joey
-- 
Linux - the choice of a GNU generation.

Please always Cc to me when replying to me on the lists.