Re: It's done

[Joel Klecker <jk@espy.org>]

At 12:10 -0700 1998-08-29, Hartmut Koptein wrote:
>My big step is now the boot-floppies. Don't know how long it will
>take. Must detect the PReP boot-image. I hope this will due also
>for CHRP. For Mac ??? the redhat ppc-bootdisk should work. And i
>must test the fdisk-wrapper for hfs versus msdos. And so on ...

>From the looks of things, we will need at least three[0][3] different
rescue/boot "floppies"[2], due to subarchitecture differences.
However, the drivers floppy is probably shareable between all
subarchitectures, given a kernel configured with "CONFIG_ALL_PPC"[1]
defined.

Other things:

  * we will need to depend on kernel-source for building our boot floppies,
this
    is because that allows the kernel Makefiles to do a lot of the work for us
  * This means the hard part is making the ramdisk image, and the drivers
floppy

I wrote some shell script code to illustrate (though I'm unsure if a case
statement could actually work):

case $subarchs_to_build in
	prep|mbx)
		cp $image $ksrc/arch/ppc/boot/ramdisk.image.gz
		cd $ksrc/arch/ppc/boot
		make zvmlinux.initrd
		cp zvmlinux.initrd rescue_prep-mbx.bin
		;;
	pmac)
		cp $image $ksrc/arch/ppc/coffboot/ramdisk.image.gz
		cd $ksrc/arch/ppc/coffboot
		make vmlinux.coff.initrd
		cp vmlinux.coff.initrd rescue_pmac.bin
		;;
	chrp)
		cp $image $ksrc/arch/ppc/chrpboot/ramdisk.image.gz
		cd $ksrc/arch/ppc/chrpboot
		make zImage.initrd
		cp zImage.initrd rescue_chrp.bin
		;;
esac

The ramdisk image should be a filesystem image (may as well be ext2), which
can be produced easily by the current boot-floppies source.

[0] PowerMac and CHRP; PReP and MBX appear able to share a single image
[1] One kernel with support for all powerpc subarchitectures
[2] Not really floppies, but kernel images with embedded ramdisks which can
be put on any media the machine can boot from, copying to a floppy is but
one possibility.
[3] APUS would be a fourth I'm assuming, but it doesn't appear to be fully
integrated into the vger tree yet
--
Joel Klecker (aka Espy)
<URL:mailto:jk@espy.org>        <URL:http://web.espy.org/>
   Debian GNU/Linux user/developer on i386 and powerpc.
<URL:mailto:espy@debian.org>  <URL:http://www.debian.org/>