Re: mipsel install failure in gxemul-ated decstation
On Wed, Aug 30, 2006 at 11:36:51AM +0100, Thiemo Seufer wrote:
> Michel Lespinasse wrote:
> > In other words, it was all my fault. Now I'm trying to figure out how to
> > convince gxemul to start a debian kernel with the debian initrd...
>
> I wonder why this is a problem, the DECstation installer images already
> contain the initrd. If gxemul is good enough at emulating a DECstation
> harddisk/cdrom you can boot from the mini.iso installer image. If the
> emulator supports netboot, then the boot.img should work.
>
> The separate kernel and initrd binaries are only needed to build bigger
> CD images. The delo package contains the 'delo' and 't-rex' commands
> to create bootable images.
What happens is that t-rex builds an ecoff image, I suppose this is what
the firmware on a real decstation would boot. However gxemul does not have
any firmware, it only knows how to load an ELF file and get it started.
Well supposedly it should also be able to load a binary file such as the
initrd image, but for some reason I've been unable to figure out the glue
to make that work. So what I need is the debian kernel + initrd image
in a single ELF file.
The way to go apparently is to build a kernel with the mips config option
CONFIG_EMBEDDED_RAMDISK so that the initrd image is embedded with the
kernel image. I'll try that tomorrow and see what happens. Incidently
this is also how I got confused as I did not know my kernel image had
such an embedded initrd image (with the sarge installer... grumpf :)
Cheers,
--
Michel "Walken" Lespinasse
"Bill Gates is a monocle and a Persian cat away from being the villain
in a James Bond movie." -- Dennis Miller
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