To make things really easy, I would put a Disk-On-Chip
(http://www.m-sys.com) flash device on your board. It has an IDE interface and
comes in 2, 4, 8, 12, 24, 40, 72 & 144MB versions. They are a little pricy but
they make things very easy and very fast to get up and running. Because they look
like any other IDE device, you can use the existing drivers without any
modifications. You can even use LILO as your bootloader, have multiple partitions
and multiple operating systems (eg. Linux, Windows, etc).
You basically have to run your own bios (if you are not using a standard one) to
initialise the basic hardware (DRAM etc), read the MBR of the DOC, load the
bootcode to DRAM and run it. I think there is an OpenFirmware page somewhere but
I don't know the URL. You could use it as a basis and strip out the stuff you
don't need.
Brendan Simon.
Bill Feero wrote:
> I want to create a 4-port terminal server that will support 4 telnet sessions.
> The target is nit firm yet but so far is a 386 or 486 with 16 (or 32) Megs of
> RAM, 2 (or 4) Megs of flash, a boot rom, 4 serial ports (16550's) and a 3Cxxx
> network connection; it will not have a display, keyboard or mouse. This is a
> board we are building, so I get the change what I must to make it work. I have
> data overload with looking Red Hat, Linux-Router, ELKS, etc. (I am two weeks
> into this project with no prior Linux or Unix experience).
>
> What should I be looking into to create a ROMable Linux kernel and file system?
>
> What do I have to do to create the kernel and file system so I can save it in
> the flash, and then get it load? The boot rom will contain whatever code I need
> it have (such as switching to protected mode and copying from the flash to the
> ram).
>
> In the future, I would like to add HTML support for system configuration and
> SNMP for management. Any help for a newbie would be appreciated.
>
> I have just downloaded the Linux-Router files and will look at them over the
> next few days.
>
> If you have done something similar, and can give me some advice or pointers I
> would appreciate it.
>
> Thanks,
> Bill
