Le Sat, Sep 27, 2003 at 19:45:37 -0400, dan a écrit:
> Ok I think I see the overall picture now. Basically 2.2 and the old bf24 are
> the only kernels small enough to fit on a floppy. Booting from cds is not
> an option because that requires a proprietary bootloader. Are the following
> situations possible. Boot from floppy -> Quik -> use quik to start up
> Cdrom, or boot from floppy -> yaboot2 -> use yaboot2 to kickstart cd.
>
> Dan Weber
>
here's a basic boot sequence on my box:
OF loads quik -> quik loads kernel (and initrd) -> system boots
this is done from boot drive. in my case it's /dev/sda2 &&
/bandit/gc/mesh/[EMAIL PROTECTED]:0 is my boot-device in OF.
old installer did:
boot from HFS floppy & root.bin (which has a cramfs ramdisk in it) ||
kernel on a mockos partition & ramdisk.image.gz
now, excluding mockos booting (for various good reasons), the
possibilities are:
boot from floppy, using the old 2.2.x kernel -> ramdisk -> do install
with 2.4.x kernel (i.e., boot from a 2.2.x kernel, but install a 2.4.x
one). this would be easy for a netinst. kludgy, but it works.
i don't see how you could use yaboot2 to 'kick start' the cd boot.
unless you formatted the CD in such a way where (probably what's going
on now in the current woody CD, i don't know) you have an HFS(+)
partition, with the contents of the woody boot floppy in it. but then
you break newworld AFAIK. current woody newworld boot is it has an
Apple_Bootstrap partition, and has yaboot and yaboot.conf in it IIRC.
one thing to note is that oldworlds booting yaboot2 will need an
Apple_Bootstrap partition, just like current newworlds do. that would
make things easier, but i'm 90% sure those won't boot from CD, for
various reasons, so you're still stuck with a floppy boot.
i'd suggest reverse engineering the mockos CD boot, and re-write the
FCode script so it'S (DFSG-)free. there are people that can do that BTW.
you need to be able to talk to the h/w ROM (BTW, for those that don't
know, what the distinguishing thing is about 'OldWorld' and 'NewWorld'
is that the ROM is encoded on a ROM chip in the oldworlds, and the new
one has basic ROM, but most of it is in RAM. or something =). the OW
ROMS are like 4 MB, and the NW are like 1-2 MB in size). well, i'm just
ranting here now, but we need to look at what we can do, and what we
can't do. and see if we can turn the 'can't do' into a 'can do', while
keeping it Free as in Speech. i'm aware of the time constraints..
bootloader can be yaboot2 or quik, i'd prefer yaboot2, but unless the
devel gets help with it, that isn't going to happen. the bootloader
doesn't matter since a 2.4.x kernel won't fit on a floppy. and if you
did make it fit, it would be very minimal, and not good enough for an
install kernel. so that's why boot with a 2.2.x, but install a 2.4.x one.
am i talking outta my ass, or do i have something useful here..
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