Experiences on Etherboot for IDE Compact flash and FLASHROMS

[ron minnich]

On Thu, 1 May 2003 dkotian3 at vsnl.net wrote:

>     Basically, I have to put the etherboot payload and LinuxBIOS on 
>     256K/512K FLASH ROMS and the Linux kernel image(2.4.18-3)
>     and application on Compact Flash ide.
>     Some kind of HOWTO/experience from many who have tried 
>     etherboot in this situation.

target pcm-5823
mainboard advantech/pcm-5823

# Enable Serial Console for debugging
option SERIAL_CONSOLE=1
option TTYS0_BAUD=38400

option DEFAULT_CONSOLE_LOGLEVEL=9
option DEBUG

option RAMTEST=1
option USE_GENERIC_ROM=1
option USE_ELF_BOOT=1
option ROM_SIZE=262144
option STD_FLASH=1

#payload ../elfImage.9load
payload ../eepro100.ebi

option PAYLOAD_SIZE=196608

===
This will build a 256K linuxbios with etherboot in it. Get an etherboot 
that will load from IDE. 

To get your payload on CF: 
First, you MUST fdisk the CF. Make the whole thing a DOS partition, 
doesn't matter. I have found the hard way that for some reason etherboot 
will not work right unless the CF has a partition table on it. I have not 
followed the whole thing through and I assume it is a need for C/H/S info 
that is not there without a partition table or some such. 

Then mkelfImage on the kernel of choice.

Then dd if=elfImage_of_kernel of=/dev/hdc bs=4096 skip=1

That's what I do.

ron