IDEA: Linux kernel and pcbios compatibility...

Eric W. Biederman ebiederman at lnxi.com
Fri Dec 19 16:38:00 CET 2003


ron minnich <rminnich at lanl.gov> writes:

> On 19 Dec 2003, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> 
> > Now if you had more than a proof of concept implementation of most
> > of the pieces I would not be happier, but anyway...
> 
> I kind of miss the point. Pink's been booting with linux in ide-flash for 
> a year, and if the flash on pink were large enough, we would have been 
> using that instead.

Possibly proof of concept is the wrong term.

What Pink does works. I can't throw J. Random kernel at beoboot and have
that work.  I can't throw memtest86 at it and have that work.  I can't use an
SMP aware kernel with beoboot.   And last I looked beoboot had a bulky user
space that makes it hard to squeeze into flash as well.  So beoboot
with 2 kernel monte works for a certain interesting subset of cases
but it does not handle the general case.

Except possibly for the exotic driver case 512KB is a large enough
FLASH chip to put in both LinuxBIOS and a kernel.  You have to work at
it with a 512KB flash chip but it is doable today.

Eric



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