[RFC] A stand-alone boot loader for PReP

[Ethan Benson]

On Sun, Jun 01, 2003 at 02:57:07PM +0100, Leigh Brown wrote:
>
> Ethan Benson said:
> >
> > On Sat, May 31, 2003 at 09:36:41PM +0100, Leigh Brown wrote:
> >>
> >> [If you bore easily:
> >> http://www.solinno.co.uk/leigh/pablo/pablo-0.2.tar.gz ]
> >>
> >> Ever since I got Linux going on my PReP box I've been unhappy about
> >> the boot loader. There is no lilo or yaboot equivalent for PReP and
> >> it's a pain. For the past several months I've been trying to devise
> >> a way of making a bootloader similar to lilo or yaboot, and this is
> >> the best I've been able to come up with.
> >
> > I have been working (slowly due to lack of time) on a complete
> > rewrite of yaboot, the plan is for it to support any OF based
> > hardware (not limited to powerpc), and to design it in a general way
> > so it can accomidate the various ways different architectures boot.
> >
> > to start with im writing a prom-libc library so all the usual stdc
> > stuff doesn't have to be reinvented crappilly like every other
> > loader seems to do, as well as get the prom specific stuff out of
> > bootloaders and into a common place (it also should allow for a
> > bootloader which is designed well enough to be more easily portable
> > to different prom types so long as prom-libc has support). it will
> > also allow the bootloader to be written much more like ordinary unix
> > C programs, making them more portable (don't port the loader, port
> > prom-libc).
> >
> > my goal is to eliminate the need for a different bootloader for
> > every variation of hardware, i particularly hate how there is a
> > dozen different loaders all with different user interfaces just for
> > powerpc, much less other architectures.
>
> Unfortunately I think a PReP boot loader is largely orthogonal to an
> OF based loader. Even PReP boxes that have OF don't support enough
> services for yaboot (in any form) to work. Most PReP boxes don't have
> OF or even allow any firmware calls from within the boot loader. With
> PReP everything you need to bring up the O/S has to be held on the
> boot partition and loaded into memory at boot time.

then why do you have a of1275 interface in your loader?

basically prep OF is more broken then apple's oldworld? now thats
impressive...

--
Ethan Benson
http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/

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