Bug#605412: O: colo -- boot loader for MIPS based Cobalt machines
Package: wnpp
I'm hereby orphaning colo, the 2nd stage boot loader for MIPS based
Cobalt machines.
Upstream is not really active anymore but responds to email. There's
one major bug that's outstanding: networking doesn't work properly when
CoLo is compiled with modern versions of GCC. Upstream tried to track
this down but couldn't find a proper solution.
CoLo is used in Debian to load the kernel/ramdisk (which the original
Cobalt boot loader cannot load because of size restrictions).
Description: boot loader for MIPS based Cobalt machines
CoLo is a replacement boot loader for MIPS based Cobalt machines such as
the Qube, RaQ, Qube2 and RaQ2. CoLo has less restrictions than the boot
loader which comes in the firmware of Cobalt machines. It can boot from
any primary partition containing an ext2/3 file system, supports booting
via the network using TFTP and NFS, features a boot menu, allows passing
boot parameters to the kernel, and offers support for initial ramdisks
(initrd). The maximum size of kernels that can be booted is only
constrained by available memory.
.
CoLo is typically used in chain mode. That is, the Cobalt firmware is
used to load CoLo from the first primary partition (ext2 revision 0), and
it is then used to load the actual Linux kernel. However, tools are
also supplied in this package to overwrite the firmware with CoLo. This
package also contains several other useful tools for Cobalt microservers,
such as a program to output information on a Cobalt's LCD and an admin
menu which allows to reboot and halt the machine through the LCD and
buttons located on the panel of a Cobalt machine.
--
Martin Michlmayr
http://www.cyrius.com/
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