IDEA: Linux kernel and pcbios compatibility...

[Joshua Wise]

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On Friday 19 December 2003 4:04 pm, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> ron minnich <rminnich at lanl.gov> writes:
> > On 19 Dec 2003, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> > > The observation has been that any sufficiently general firmware
> > > bootloader tends to become an OS, so why not use a real OS.
> >
> > ah ha! we've come full circle :-)
> >
> > good to hear.
>
> I have never disagreed.  Now that we have something that works for
> the low end limited ROM solutions I can revisit some of the more
> interesting ideas.

*jumps up and down like a hyperactive two-year-old* LAB can do that stuff!

I would definately like to see LAB used on more than just ARM.

> > > So the things I actually care about are: booting over myrinet,
> > > booting over inifinband, booting over quadrics, booting over a pair of
> > > bonded nics.  Having a good tg3 driver.   Getting Lustre as my root
> > > filesystem.  Unless size issues kill it again I am going to use the
> > > linux kernel as my bootloader to do this.
If you can have it in the kernel you can have it in LAB. LAB's command line 
API is really easy - I've ported userland apps (mtderase) to LAB in sub-10 
minutes.

As to size issues, we're at a 512k zImage. We do not have bzImages on ARM, so 
I could not tell you the size with it. 512k is with a few ARM-specific 
drivers, and jffs2. It does not have networking. This is with kernel 2.6.

> > yah, this is why we still put linux in flash here at LANL.

Oh and did I say LAB had MTD support? :)

> Now if you had more than a proof of concept implementation of most
> of the pieces I would not be happier, but anyway...
*jumps up and down* I do I do!!

> Eric
/joshua

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Joshua Wise | www.joshuawise.com
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In memoriam | Whiskers the hamster, 2001 - Dec 15, 2003
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