Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2000 15:17:59 -0700 From: Parag Patel <parag@cgt.com> To: "Daniel C. Sobral" <dcs@newsguy.com> Cc: Ronald G Minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: freebsd bios. Message-ID: <66205.961453079@pinhead.parag.codegen.com> In-Reply-To: Message from "Daniel C. Sobral" <dcs@newsguy.com> of "Tue, 20 Jun 2000 07:06:36 %2B0900." <394E996C.EF72B68F@newsguy.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Tue, 20 Jun 2000 07:06:36 +0900, "Daniel C. Sobral" wrote: > >And, in the process, they are teaching the firmware about Ext2FS, >Ext3FS, RheiserFS, (in our case) ffs, vinum, etc, so it can find the >kernel in whatever place it is, or resorting to some sort of bootfs >(though any software RAID would still have to be taught), with it's >inherent disadvantages? Well, it's more of a matter of putting the kernel itself into the boot ROM with some small assembly/C code to turn on DRAM and an ungzipper to load and run it. It's fairly simple, other than dealing with the various motherboard/chipset vagaries. It's possible to make a complete BIOS based on Linux that in turn loads and boots another kernel, but that I don't think that this is what the LinuxBIOS folks are attempting. Instead they have (or will have) access to the flash from within Linux to load a kernel directly into flash (along with its startup code) rather than placing it into /. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.) Personally, I'd set it up to hold two kernel images - one for testing and one for emergency recovery. If a bad kernel gets into the flash, recovering will be ... painful. But there may not be enough room. -- Parag Patel To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?66205.961453079>