Re: Second round of powerpc subarch investigation : boot-loaders.
On Sun, Oct 19, 2003 at 11:29:38AM +0200, Sven Luther wrote:
> Hello,
>
> In order to continue work on making debian-installer subarch friendly, i
> now launch a second round of investigation concerning the way different
> subarches boot. The situation as i understand it is :
[snip]
> prep: no idea. yaboot doesn't work, nor does quik. There is no OF, but i
> think some kind of direct booting as well as netbooting is available.
> kernel with builtin initrd should work.
Boots from the firmware the zImage*.prep from arch/ppc/boot/images in
the kernel. To build a ramdisk into this, the ramdisk to be used is
placed at arch/ppc/boot/images/ramdisk.image.gz, and 'make
zImage.initrd' is issued. This file is used on all PReP systems, and
the command to boot varries from Motorola to IBM PReP machines (Motorola
has PPCBug, and for disk it's pboot ...., and 'help pboot' should
describe the arguments, for netboot, 'help niot' or 'help noit', I
forget which and 'nbo' to get and boot the kernel.
In general, to embed an initrd into an image (.coff, etc) the image must
be at arch/ppc/boot/images/ramdisk.image.gz and then 'make
zImage.initrd'.
> 2) We develop a separate tool (like sparc's piggyback i was told)
> which is able to add a initrd onto an existing kernel.
As the images used, prior to additional tools being run on them (such as
mkprep) use an ldscript to determine locations, this might be possible.
--
Tom Rini
http://gate.crashing.org/~trini/
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