[Skiboot] OPAL Spec and conformance

[Nathan Whitehorn]

On 06/10/15 15:43, Stewart Smith wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> This is something I'm sending both to the System Software Workgroup at
> OpenPower fonudation and the skiboot list as it's relevant to both
> audiences.
>
> SYSSW people: note that the skiboot list is *public* to the world.
>
> There is a need to have an OPAL Specification as part of the OpenPower
> effort along with a conformance test suite.
>
> Goal:
> - OPAL API specification (including device-tree)
>    - i.e. what host OS interacts with
> - spec for petitboot environment
>    - i.e. how you can boot an OS, what filesystems/device drivers are
>    supported.
[...]
> - come up with a plan to document and standardize petitboot environment
>    - (i.e. what can you boot from. XFS? ext4?)
>
>

One thing that would be *extremely* helpful here is an environment to 
run a second-stage loader. We need this for FreeBSD for a variety of 
reasons, mostly that the boot loader is responsible for loading kernel 
modules according to scripts rather than having a prefab initrd.

On petitboot systems, the way this works now is that we ship a Linux ELF 
executable on a FAT32 filesystem that does all the right things and then 
calls kexec itself. This works fine except that you have to exit to a 
shell and run it by hand since there is no way to put something in the 
petitboot menu that does not get kexec'ed.
-Nathan