Re: Debian-installer, older hardware, boot loaders, miboot & amiboot & ..

[Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de>]

Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr> writes:

> On Tue, Mar 30, 2004 at 10:36:20AM +0200, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
> > Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr> writes:
> > 
> > > On Sun, Mar 28, 2004 at 10:30:23PM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > > > Sven Luther wrote:
> > > > Yes, that's somewhat more of an issue. I'd expect amiboot to be
> > > > buildable without excessive effort, although the Amiga includes aren't
> > > > Free. We can't really ship amiboot as part of d-i anyway - it's a
> > > > loadlin equivilent, not a syslinux one. Amiga-lilo used to exist and
> > 
> > Amiga-lilo had afaik no support for graphics crads and probably no 060
> > support.
> > 
> > > The main difference being that all the stuff needed are part of the
> > > amiga rom, while this is not the case for msdos, if i remember well.
> > 
> > The rom and system header files are part of the hardware/operating
> > system. Iirc the 'syscall' numbers and parameter format is shiped with
> > the Amiga Basic. If pulling a few function offsets needed for amiboot
> > (a few '#define open_library -236') out of a hat isn't legally good
> > enough, they could be extracted from there. That should cover the legal
> > side even if the C header are not falling under the "distributed with
> > the OS" part. They can also be taken out of the many programming books
> > or for Amigas.
> 
> Well, the FSF folk told me that header files containing this kind of
> info cause no problem, provided you write it yourself, and strip the
> comments. At least this was the case for the amiga RDB code i
> contributed to libparted (and assigned copyright to the FSF), so i guess
> they know what they are talking about.

Good. Tell me if you need any of them (re)written. I have the Amiga
RKRM Books and could type in the needed offsets.

> > > I think that the easiest way would be to have a amiga bootable
> > > partition, with amiboot and the auto-executing amiga shell script needed
> > > to launch it. This may all be installable from linux, provided either i
> > > finish the affs create implementation in libparted, or we package Roman
> > > Zippel's mkaffs. This would be a rather clean way of doing this, and you
> > > can even rely on the early amiga-rom based boot selector, and play with
> > > boot priorities to have it auto loaded or go to amiga os.
> > 
> > You need a RGDB, which parted can create, a OFS formated partition (or
> 
> which parted can create now :)

OFS? Can linux even mount that?

> > the l:filesystem) for old roms (newer roms have affs), the shell
> > script, the amiboot, the 68040.library or the 68060.library +
> > 68040dummy.library, the setpatch and the device driver for various
> > graphics cards.
> 
> Um, those libraries are probably non-free. Or possibly in accelerator
> boards flash roms ? No static linking is possible ? 

Absolutly non-free. Not in the flash rom. The Installer could ask for
the installation floppies, if users still have working ones.

> > Forget about booting linux without going through the already installed
> > AmigaOS. The best you can do is clone the existing system into a new
> > boot partition or provide an Amiga Installer script to aid installing
> > under nativ AmigaOS (which is actually quite easy to write).
> 
> BTW, could you test the new apus kernels (2.4.25) on your apus box ?
> 
> Friendly,
> 
> Sven Luther

Given that apusboot allways hangs on my board I can't. For what I
figured out I have to flush the bios and never dared to do so.

MfG
        Goswin