On Sat, Apr 27, 2002 at 02:44:13PM +0200, Karsten Merker wrote: > 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. They will switch - The netinst cd already offers 3 or 4 different kernels. Teaching delo how to read an iso9660 shouldnt be too hard. While doing that i'll teach arcboot the same :) Sounds like a hacking session. > - 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). We should drop all non ELF stuff except for bootloaders. Guido is already looking into building some kind of piggypack loader like PALO or SILO which is a "raw" dump or ECOFF which then itself has an ELF image inside which it knows how to move to the right location. > - The program I use to generate the bootsector needs some polishing > (proper commandline parsing, automatic extraction of the symbol values). DELO needs some polishing and i'll do that - I guess we can speed up kernel loading by a factor of 2 or 3. And we'll add iso9660. Flo -- Florian Lohoff flo@rfc822.org +49-5201-669912 Nine nineth on september the 9th Welcome to the new billenium
Attachment:
pgpgfA9QWTt0e.pgp
Description: PGP signature