On 8/17/05, Sven Luther <sven.luther at wanadoo.fr> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 17, 2005 at 09:20:23PM +0300, Cyril Plisko wrote:
> > On 8/17/05, Sven Luther <sven.luther at wanadoo.fr> wrote:
> > > On Wed, Aug 17, 2005 at 04:56:37PM +0200, Joerg Schilling wrote:
> > > > Cyril Plisko <cyril.plisko at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > let me disagree with you. Since we have nothing working right now
> > > > > we have quite a load of code to write and test even _before_ we get
> > > > > to crypto and ATA subsystem. Of course in a sense that we still
> > > > > will not have a fully pledged distribution you are right and lack
> > > > > of the basic stuff like the one you mentioned will prevent us
> > > > > from declaring the job is done. But still one have to start walking
> > > > > in order to get somewhere.
> > > >
> > > > The PPC hardware we use depends on an ATA disk and we need an ATA
> > > > driver in order to boot.
> > >
> > > Can't you netboot with a ramdisk image like linux dies ?
> >
> > I guess that should be possible too. Can you describe the Linux
> > netboot process in more details ? I am quite familiar with how
> > Solaris does netboot on SPARC and x86, but have to admit
> > I amnot sure how similar or different Linux netboot is on PPC
>
> Another why would be a NFS root system, this would probably work nicely in the
> solaris framework.
Should be. In fact Solaris SPARC has it working very nice - that is
what I originally planned to start from. Still it has a drawback of having
to implement complete NFS stack in order to load kernel modules
(Solaris kernel is highly modularized).
>
> For the ramdisk method, yaboot or grub2 copies the (compressed) initrd in ram,
> and passes to the booting kernel the address of said ramdisk in r4 or
> something such. the kernel then accesses this ramdisk, it knows its size, or
> the end of it, don't remember, and then mapps a filesystem on it. compressed
> ext2 in a loop (cloop) device, or cramfs usually.
>
Right, that is what so appealing about GRUB - you can have your kernel
boot archive built on cross system and then load it from disk/network
into RAM and have it running even without network/disk drivers.
Should be a gift for early kernel work, when even core functionaly
is barely present.
Regards,
Cyril
