Random comments on LinuxBIOS

[Eric W. Biederman]

"McMechan, James W CIV" <james.mcmechan at navy.mil> writes:

> Here is what I wrote while trying to catch up to list, though there is a FAQ I
> produced this while working my way through the emails perhaps some of it could
> be added to the FAQ

Would you be interested in maintaining or helping to maintain the FAQ?
You seem to have a nack for putting the information together.

> LinuxBIOS is a project to replace the original BIOS on motherboards with open
> source.
> 
> It appears that the two most common uses for LinuxBIOS are for Supercomputer
> clusters and embedded systems.
> 
> 
> LinuxBIOS no longer always uses a real OS to load the OS.

That is not quite correct.  

LinuxBIOS requires a real OS, or at least a piece of software
that can run standalone without any OS or BIOS services on
the bare hardware.  Which is essentially the definition of
a real OS though it is not the definition of a general purpose
OS.

In the case of ADLO, ADLO can be considered a special purpose
OS that mimics the syscall interface of a standard BIOS.

> 
> LinuxBIOS currently can boot several payloads including:
> 1 Linux which is what started all this, hence the name.
> 2 Plan9 Ron Minnich seems to like this one.
> 3 VxWorks Felix Radensky said he had success with a older boot method
> 4 EtherBoot which despite its name can also boot from IDE hard disks with a
> patch or the dev branch
> 
> 5 ADLO is a shim to allow the Boch emulator's BIOS to be used on top of
> LinuxBIOS to boot some versions of that other OS or to run VGA controller ROMs
> which seem to assume that a BIOS is present.
> 
> ?
> 
> The Supercomputer people appear to want remote control, remote booting and fast
> boot times without user interaction. For example "Press F2" is a very
> inconvenient task on a system with 100 computers
> 
> 
> The embedded people appear to want full control of the boot process and very
> fast boot times. For example who wants to watch a memory test go by on their
> VCR/MP3 player or see "Press F2" without a keyboard.

In addition there is some background work on secure/trusted booting.  I don't
know if anything has really happened with that yet, but ADLO grow out of
the interest in trusted booting.

> LinuxBIOS is installed into the flash ROM in place of the original BIOS.
> 
> Most flash ROMs are currently 2 Megabits in size, i.e. a 29SF020 which is only
> 256 Kilobytes of storage, or some might be 4 Mbit ROM which provides 512 Kbytes
> and so could allow for very squeezed down Linux kernel to also be included in
> the ROM, though I don't know of a useful kernel that small.
> 
> It would be nice to add a larger flash ROM but many motherboards do not connect
> enough address lines to the Flash ROM socket, for even the 4 Mbit part or they
> solder the chip down.

For LPC flash parts the address line count is not a real issue, new boards
have them and they current are up to 8Mbit in size, but do not have a theoretical
limit.

> Another popular if grumbled about option is the disk on a chip the DoC
> Millennium which is a paged flash part that can have LinuxBIOS in the first part
> and up to 8 Mbytes of other data on other pages of the chip. Very short ~3-10
> seconds boot times should be possible with this method.
> 
> 
> The BIOS Flash can usually be programmed in place by either just reflashing the
> original BIOS or by the hotswap method also known as the dental floss method,
> referring to putting dental floss under a PLCC chip to make it easy to remove
> without requiring metal tools in a powered on system. The hotswap method is not
> for the faint of heart but not all that difficult either, the system is booted
> with a working ROM which is then pulled out and the ROM to be programmed
> inserted in its place, then the ROM flashing program is run, and when done a
> reboot can be tried, this does not require a programmer as it uses the
> motherboards ability to update its BIOS as the programmer, if the reboot fails
> the original ROM is reinserted and the system rebooted again, all this requires,
> is some spare flash ROMs it is a good idea to make and label a couple backups
> incase something goes wrong, I have put ROMs in DIP sockets backwards destroying
> the ROMs, and ESD is a worry even if it is not a commo!
> 
> n problem.
> 
> Some people also use a very nice device called the BIOS savior which allows for
> two BIOS ROMS to be switched by the user with a switch.
> 
> 
> Compact Flash IDE adaptors appear to be popular as the CF does not need the spin
> up time of a real hard disk. Very short boot times of ~3-10 seconds are claimed
> for this configuration also.
> 
> 
> Each model of motherboard currently needs its own build information due to a
> lack of standards in how the circuitboards are laid out between models and
> manufactures.
> 
> 
> If you have a motherboard that is not listed, a "lspci" will show what chipsets
> are in use and you can then check to see if they are in the LinuxBIOS tree, if
> not some research may be needed to get the documentation for that chipset.
> 
> 
> The kexec patches date back to the original LinuxBIOS with the Linux kernel in
> the BIOS ROM and allowed for new kernels to be loaded and executed without
> rebooting back to the BIOS this would allow for a minimal kernel in the BIOS and
> a full featured kernel to be loaded by the first kernel. Also the BIOS ROMs have
> a limited programming life and limited space so a small unchanging kernel that
> then loads the final kernel from something else prolongs the useful life of the
> ROMs.
> 
> 
> Ron Minnich at LANL uses similar feature called "two kernel monte"
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/monte/
> 
> 
> LinuxBIOS now has the ability to make use of the CMOS space for fallback/normal
> boot image selection, serial port baud rates, and boot order for Etherboot, Ron
> Minnich also used it authentication information for a Plan9 cluster. See the
> cmos.layout files for information.
> 
> 
> Steven James had nice comments on Normal/Fallback images:
> LinuxBIOS for that board (and many others) supports two copies of
> LinuxBIOS, fallback and primary. The fallback image is intended to be old
> and stable and it's purpose is to act as a sort of rescue image. The
> primary image is the one that gets updated to the latest and greatest, and
> is meant to be more versatile and complete.

And after the most recent update the ``hair trigger'' problem has been
solved.  In particular it now requires several boot failures in a row
before LinuxBIOS switches into fallback mode.  Generally this is 3 successive
failures.

> The fallback image is loaded at the top of the flash, and always receives
> control at power on or reset. It does very minimal setup (switch to 32bit
> flat memory protected mode), checks and clears the CMOS boot bit, and if
> it was set, jumps to the primary image. This way, if the primary fails,
> hitting reset will boot from the fallback image alone.

The mechanism has been updated to keep a failure count in the CMOS and only
when the failure count crosses a threshold is the boot bit cleared.  The
counter is reset after LinuxBIOS has successfully loaded an image like
etherboot.

Etherboot now implements a similar scheme to allow two images on the disk.
One at the start one at the end, but installing an image at the end of
the disk still requires some work.

> >From your config, you were building a primary image. the missing bytes are
> for the fallback image to be appended. It didn't work because you didn't
> have a fallback image at the top of the flash (the end of the image file).
> 
> Ron Minnich expanded on fallback vs. primary:
> 
> You need to build TWO linuxbioses, a fallback and a primary. The fallback 
> is 64k. The primary is (romsize-64k). 
> 
> To build a romimage, you build the fallback, build the primary, then:
> 
> cat primary/romimage fallback/romimage > final_romimage
> 
> flash_rom final_romimage
> 
> Steve Gehlbach wrote about using BOOT_IDE:
> See pcchips787.config in util/config for complete configuration.
 
Note significant pieces of this information are not using the ELF
bootloader, and so describes a deprecated feature.  But it will
not be removed in the 1.0.x stable series.  In the development series
the code will not be added.

> option BOOT_IDE=1
> This enables booting from IDE, the file to use is linux.bin.gz:
> 
> option IDE_BOOT_DRIVE=2
> If you do not use drive 0  (default), then you can set which drive to 
> boot; (0,1,2,3) are the four standard PC drives:
> 
> option ONE_TRACK=32
> The linux.bin.gz file is put in raw form at partition 1, ie, the first 
> partition on the disk.  This is located just past the partition table. 
> The partition table size varies, it is "one track" from the beginning of 
> the disk.  "one track" in c/h/s notation is "s" or the number of sectors 
> per track.  ONE_TRACK is in sectors, the software multiplies by 512. 
> Most disks are 63 sectors per track (the default), but my CF is 32 
> sectors per track.  eg, the partion table is 63x512 or 32x512 bytes.
> 
> You can partition your disk as you want, but Linux goes raw in partition 
> 1; just make sure partition 1 is big enough, not a problem on today's 
> disks.  You could put the Linux root file system on partition 2, for 
> example.  In pcchips787.config, I put the Linux root file system on IDE 
> 0, partition 2 (I was experimenting with Linux in partition 1), but I 
> eventually put Linux on drive 2 using CF.  You are right, copying of 
> linux.bin.gz raw to the partition is dangerous, and something like "cat 
> linux.bin.gz > /dev/hda1" will definitely screw the disk if you put the 
> wrong disk or partition.  I recommend a shell script, fingers cannot be 
> trusted.  You can also use "dd" but "cat" works.
> 
> Greg Watsons had some good comments on on the boot process and file layout:
> There seem to be two main parts to linuxbios. The first is 
> arch/{arch}/config/ctr0.base which does the very low level 
> initialization, like turning on memory, etc. The second is 
> arch/{arch}/lib/c_start.S which does whatever else is necessary to 
> call the C function hardwaremain(). hardwaremain() then does whatever 
> else is necessary to load Linux.
> 
> c_start.S is linked with linuxbios.a, a library containing generic 
> support routines (those found in the lib directory) and anything 
> specified using the 'object'  directive in a Config file (and other 
> stuff). The resultant 'executable' is called linuxbios_c. The loader 
> script used to link linuxbios_c is config/linuxbios_c.ld, and is 
> configured to be loaded relative to _RAMBASE.
> 
> crt0.base is not linked against anything. Any additional assembly 
> routines you need must be specified using the 'mainboardinit' 
> directive in a Config file. This causes the specified assembly file 
> to be added to "crt0_includes.h" which is in turn included at the 
> start of crt0.base (or at the end in the case of the ppc version). 
> The loader script used to link crt0.base is in 
> arch/{arch}/config/ldscript.base. The resultant 'executable' is 
> called linuxbios and will be loaded at _ROMBASE. The tricky thing is 
> that this loader script will also load the linuxbios_c 'executable' 
> at a location called _payload in this file. The main task of 
> crt0.base is then to initialize enough hardware so that this payload 
> can be copied from ROM into ram (which may also involve uncompressing 
> code). Then control is transferred to _start, which is the first 
> location in linuxbios_c.
> 
> To get an idea of how crt0.base works, look at the following files. 
> This is the order of execution specified by the configuration file 
> for sis735.
> 
> cpu/i386/entry16.inc
> cpu/i386/entry32.inc
> superio/sis/950/setup_serial.inc
> pc80/serial.inc
> arch/i386/lib/console.inc
> cpu/k7/earlymtrr.inc
> northsouthbridge/sis/735/raminit.inc
> arch/i386/config/crt0.base
> 
> Next look at c_start.S which will show you what happens once control 
> is transferred to _start. Finally, look at 
> arch/{arch}/lib/hardwaremain.c to see what other stuff is done to get 
> Linux loaded.
> 
> Most other files are specific to particular hardware, so it can be 
> pretty confusing to just browse the tree.
> 
> Hope this helps,

It Looks like a very good summary.

Eric