On Thu, 27 Oct 2005 19:18:44 -0600, William Kucharski writes:
>Basically, like most operating systems, OpenSolaris needs the booter to load
>the kernel executable and provide basic services (console I/O, memory mapping,
>device access, etc.) until the kernel is able to fend for itself.
With Linux, the kernel has almost no interaction with the boot code. i.e.
"and provide basic services ... until the kernel is able to fend for itself"
is not true with U-Boot/Linux - U-Boot just loads images and runs them
(there is a primitive system call interface for "stand-alone apps" but
Linux doesn't use it).
>With the coming of the GRUB-based
>newboot to Solaris, the x86 boot process looks much more like the boot
>process with U-Boot where the booter loads an initial RAM disk
>image that turns around and loads the kernel and other supporting features.
Is this "GRUB-based newboot" code part of OpenSolaris? i.e. open source?
If so, where do I get it from? I would like to look at it and maybe give
it a go.
>There are two obvious approaches _to_ take here:
>
>1) Add support for your board type to GRUB2, if it isn't already present
>
>2) Modify U-Boot to know how to deal with the initial RAM disk image that
> GRUB2 would normally load
The second option sounds like the way to go, since U-Boot already knows
how to load images into memory and run them. Cheers!
Murray...
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