Jan Spitalnik wrote: > Hi Jan, > > On 24.2.2009, at 20:55, Jan Setje-Eilers wrote: > >> >> Hi, you should really take a slightly different approach. The BIOS is >> simply not in the same state when it didn't initiate an eltorito boot. >> It's really something they will need to get the firmware to initiate. >> Forcing the system to attempt to boot off of cd at that point is not >> possible without the disk loader emulating a whole lot of the code >> that would have been supplied by the (platform specific) firmware at >> that point. > > Interesting, didn't know that. > >> >> A better approach is probably with a system that supports a virtual >> cd/dvd. That would allow the test harness to externally add/remove cd >> images and the BIOS would simply be configured to boot from the cd/dvd >> if one is present. For instance x4x00 can do this, scripting it might >> be a bit interesting, but as long as the switches can be accessed from >> the ssh connection it should be possible. > > That really limits our ability to test commodity hw (imagine notebooks) > in an automated fashion. I suppose there's no standardised way of > telling the BIOS to boot CD.
It's not standard hardware, welcome to the wonderful world of supporting x86. :( What's the purpose behind this testing, if it's really to get hardware breadth for booting from CD, then it may be worth optimizing the manual aspect a bit, but biting the fact that it's going to be an afternoon for someone every week (it's a lousy job, but there are far worse ones). IMHO as long as we think about which bits of hardware get tested that way and make sure they are all sufficiently unique, then there's probably value there. > Do you know who can i talk to about the LOM (webpage/email)? You'll want to find the docs for the platform. I'd look on the pts site for sun systems. Others that can do this well are HP and IBM servers. -jan > Thanks a lot! > Spity > >> >> -jan >> >> >> Mike Pogue wrote: >>> -------- Original Message -------- >>> Subject: Need CD boot from GRUB in automated testing >>> Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:12:07 +0100 >>> From: Jan Spitalnik <Jan.Spitalnik at Sun.COM> >>> To: Michael.Pogue at Sun.COM >>> CC: Paul Stanley - Sun Microsystems Ireland - Solaris Software >>> <Paul.Stanley at Sun.COM>, install team bj <installzone-bj at Sun.COM>, >>> angela <Angela.Li at Sun.COM> >>> Hi Michael, >>> I'm a software engineer in Solaris System Test and we're currently >>> involved in install automation of OpenSolaris. We hit a problem where >>> we'd like to add a GRUB menu entry that would boot off CD/DVD. >>> Unfortunately it seems that grub does not support chainloading CDs >>> (root (cd0); chainload). We found some outdated documents on the web >>> detailing a use of SBM >>> (http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~bernhard/grub-chain-cd.html >>> ), unfortunately this method does not work on our notebooks since the >>> second bootloader can't recognize the media in the tray :-( >>> Do you think your team could help us? >>> Thank you! >>> Spity >>
