bootable CDs for mipsel [was: Reading fibmap]
Hallo everybody,
I have just managed to build an ISO-9660 CD that is bootable on a DECstation
(mipsel). Unfortunately, this is not yet suitable for the woody CDs :-(.
Problems:
- I used the "simple" method without second stage loader, so we can only
boot one file per CD, meaning kernels for different systems have to
be spread over different CDs, although I do not think this should
be much of a problem - i386 handles different kernel versions similarly.
- As the firmware does not know anything about binary formats and expects
a raw memory dump, I have to convert the tftpimage with the installer
to a raw file (this can be done with objcopy) and I need to find out
the address of the kernel_entry label. Unfortunately the tftpimage
(which has to be in ECOFF on DECstations) is generated from an
intermediate ELF file by using elf2ecoff from the mips-tools package,
which discards all symbol information. I could get the address
either from the symbol table in System.map or from the intermediate
ELF image, but current boot-floppies include neither of them, so this
could be used only with future boot-floppies revisions, where I could
include the needed information.
As a short-time workaround I could rebuild the bf-3.0.22 tftpimages
and we could include the raw image plus the needed symbol table in
debian-cd, but that is an ugly kludge and I assume the debian-cd
folks would not be willing to do that (which I can fully understand).
- The program I use to generate the bootsector needs some polishing
(proper commandline parsing, automatic extraction of the symbol values).
Regards,
Karsten
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