[Cbe-oss-dev] kboot updates

[Scott D. Davilla]

Hi,
	I've been following the progress on the ps3, nice work. I'm 
doing something similar with the AppleTV and creating a kboot based 
bootloader for general use in booting linux.

	The AppleTV is EFI based with no BIOS and the efi firmware 
prevents booting elilo or any other efi based bootloader. So a mach-o 
secondary bootloader was created that can boot a linux kernel/initrd. 
This works fine but is problematic for users as it requires all sorts 
of special setup.

	My bootloader will solve these problems by using a kboot type 
boot that looks for a standard grub config in addition to the kboot 
config. I can kexec from a kernel that runs under a debootstrap built 
file system. This works nicely even from a USB pen drive. This file 
system is too large for what it needs to do so I've moved to a small 
initramfs to get the distribution size down to under 5MB.

	My problem is I can't kexec from kernel that loads an 
initramfs that has busybox and glibc. It just hangs. Since I don't 
have serial hardware on the appletv, it makes debugging the issue 
difficult.

	I'm running busybox 1.9.2 under 2.6.23 and 2.6.24 kernels. 
The other parts are based off a 7.10 Ubuntu (debian). I've noticed 
that most kboot derivatives are running busybox 1.32 or early. Is 
there a reason that you are using busybox 1.3.2? kexec problems.

	Also how is the shutdown sequence done. kexec tries to run 
"/sbin/shutdown", "etc/shutdown" or "/bin/shutdown". Yet, I don't see 
these in the ps3 kboot distro. So how does kexec work under the ps3?

Thanks for your time.
Scott