Eric Seppanen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> On Fri, Mar 16, 2001 at 12:20:46PM -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> > I keep finding that I really need to be able to use linuxbios to choose
> > a kernel image and enter a kernel command line. This is a basic
> > feature of nearly every kernel loader such a lilo and syslinux.
> >
> > Using kernels to load kernels definately has its place but is too space
> > intensive for what I am doing.
> >
> > I think I heard that someone had some sort of serial console input
> > code. Is this available? Is it useful? ...or should I start from
> > scratch?
>
> I've done it, though my code is pretty far forked from linuxbios-cvs. The
> code should be really easy to tear out, though. Grab a tarball from
> http://www.reric.net/linux/linuxbios/
> and take a look at these bits of code to see if it'll work for you:
>
> debug.c, especially debug_menu() and the kparam_* functions
> printk.c, getline() stub
> serial.c, serial_getline(), which uses serial_getchar() and
> serial_printchar() to actually move chars to/from the port.
>
> I'm not sure what mechanism printk uses in cvs to print chars to the
> serial port, but you'll probably want to make printk and the input-echo
> use the same mechanism.
>
> And of course I should mention that this is a wonderful vehicle for
> fiddling with chipset or PCI registers, changing kernel parameters,
> testing memory or other hardware, adding quick-and-dirty debug tests...
This sounds nice, I'll have to take a look. I would like to find a
clean way to use this with the main linuxbios tree. My hunch is we
could have a normal linuxbios boot a minimal elf image that has all of
the debugging code in it. And from there we could boot whatever we
like from flash, or wherever.
Does a minimal image sound workable or does this sound like too much
code duplication?
Eric
