Tom,
thanks for summarizing the meeting.
I have to say that my line was pretty bad and I was loosing
the conversation from time to time. The whole Xen part is
a surprise for me for example :)
Ok, here is my thoughts
1. I see a big value in having Solaris booted the very same way
across all the supported architectures. GRUB2 is a great promise
in this respect. OTOH, I am not sure how feasible it is for, let's say,
embedded system. So having a functional TFTP based fallback
mechanism is important too.
2. As much as it tempting to just offload the task to OF I feel
somewhat uneasy with OF doing all the work - it means we are
nailing some dependencies on specific OF implementation and that
is not good if you consider different PowerPC systems out there.
Genesi is not the only PPC vendor [However by far most cooperative :)]
So my options would be
1. Fully fledged GRUB2 implementation if possible.
2. TFTP if 1. is not possible.
On 1/10/06, thomas riddle <Tom.Riddle at sun.com> wrote:
> Mon 01/09/2006
>
> Attendees
>
> Sun
> - Bill Kucharski
> - Jan Setje-Eilers: Sun Newboot Team
> SunLabs
> - Tom Riddle
> - Josh Uziel
> - Guy Shaw
> Genesi
> - Sven Luther
> Freescale
> - Mark Douglas
> Polaris Community
> - Cyril Pisko
> - Joerg Schilling
> - Dennis Clarke
>
> After introductions, Jan gave a quick overview of the newboot approach
> implemented currently on x86. With decent amounts of memory available
> they essentially are doing one large read of a couple of executables to
> facilitate faster boot times, reduce the HW interaction and their
> associated driver dependencies. On x86 disk boot (network boot uses
> PXEGRUB) GRUB reads via UFS two files --> multiboot (ramdisk reader) and
> the boot_archive, jumps to multiboot and goes. The SPARC implementation
> is pending but no firm schedule has been set. They will take a similar
> approach however when a system has OBP the benefits of GRUB are less
> obvious. That brings us to ODW/OF and Solaris/PPC.
>
> Suggestion of using inetboot was expected to provide issues as
> tracibility is difficult and UFSboot was thought to be an easier route.
>
> Since we have OF implementation on ODW and the capabilities of the
> Genesi team to enhance it, the choices came down to
> -------
> Use a TFTP boot to load a simplified PPC flavored multiboot and the
> boot_archive.
> * this is the most straighforward approach and least code intensive,
> small changes to current multiboot to remove BIOS calls. Not the best
> longterm solution.
>
> Enhance OF to enable loading multiple files, a simplified PPC flavored
> multiboot and the boot_archive.
> * requires some modification of OF to allow loading of multiple files.
> Need to clarify UFS support in OF?
>
> Use OF to load GRUB2 and then it loads a simplified PPC flavored
> multiboot and the boot_archive.
> * OF provides the same functionality and why layer this with GRUB, OF
> has a menu system already and we have the right people to enhance OF.
> GRUB knows the FreeBSD variant of UFS, so it'll need to be changed to
> also support the Solaris variant of it.
>
> Additionally it was mentioned that the Xen boot approach was to combine
> all the seperate modules ie: krtld, unix, genunix, multiboot into one
> single bin and load it. Still a ways out on this but will follow it's
> progress internally here.
>
> AI -- Jan was to review with Shudong / T Marsland on boot specifics that
> came up here
>
>
> It seems to me that any option here includes work on a PPC version of
> multiboot/ramdisk reader. Show of hands needed to agree on specifically
> what mechanism wil be used to load it. Chime in folks.
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>
--
Regards,
Cyril
