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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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