Chuck, this topic was brought up several times on this list,
mainly answer is - people don't want to give up loader stuff
for free. Few months ago, I posted in here and asked if people
want to formalize low level boot code. Got few replies -
"it is hard", "depends on system design", "blah, blah"
I have worked with AMD Elan SC400. Pretty nice design, you don't
need BIOS to boot it up from flash or PCMCIA (there is jumper
to select boot). Mainly you need to setup all AMD registers
(23h/24h) according to specs, there is quite a lot of them
around 50, in real mode, then jump to stripped out Linux
boot (Setup.s). You'll need to cut off all VGA/Floppy/IDE
code from there. If you like lilo, you can jump to lilo
code, instead of kernel......Easy to say...quite a lot of
code editing, but not impossible.
At 10:43 PM 1/28/99 -0800, Chuck Carlson wrote:
>
>Hello All,
>
>I'm looking for boot loaders which don't need a bios to load linux from
>linear flash memory.
>
>The AMD Elan SC400 evaluation board can be configured to direct the bios
>chip select to linear flash memory device in the pcmcia port.
>
>I assume lilo needs a bios, so I can't use it because we don't otherwise
>need one in our final embedded linux product.
>
>Thanks,
>
>Chuck Carlson
>
>
