On 10/28/05, Murray.Jensen at csiro.au <Murray.Jensen at csiro.au> wrote:
> 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!
Indeed, GRUB loads a multiboot-compliant image and passes control to it.
What Solaris does - it just provides such multiboot image and expects the
bootloader to grok it. So if U-Boot would support multiboot spec that should
do the trick... more or less.
Regards,
Cyril
> Murray...
> --
> Murray Jensen, CSIRO Manufacturing & Infra. Tech. Phone: +61 3 9662 7763
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