[Etherboot-developers] Re: [Etherboot-users] Booting a non-supported OS.

[Marty C. <md...@th...>]

On 9/6/2001 11:03 AM Anders Pettersson and...@md... wrote:
>Now I want to move on and wants to boot up the PC104 board with a micro
>kernel. The format of the kernel image can be either a binary image or a
>S-record file. So I want to be able to modify the etherboot code to
>accept these formats.

This isn't my area of specialty with Etherboot, but I'll do what I can.  
Ken should be back in a few days, and may be able to give a more informed 
statement.

>I have looked into to the source and think that the modification is
>possible, but as I not fully understand the code yet I might be wrong.
>I'm also aware of that I probably have to modify mknbi source as well to
>get a tagged image.

I suspect you'll mostly need to modify mknbi to accept the format of your 
object code, and convert it into NBI (network bootable image) format.  If 
you download the mknbi package from, say:

   http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/etherboot/mknbi-1.2.tar.gz

You will find a file called "spec.txt", which has describes NBI format. 
Etherboot is also capable of loading ELF format, though I'm not sure how 
much help that will be to you.

>Now to the question, is there anyone out there who can give some
>pointers or advice in how this can be accomplished? Or can tell if this
>project cannot be done? Or have it already been done by someone else?

I'm almost certain that what you want can be done.  I suspect that most 
of the work is in modifying mknbi, but wait a few days and Ken or another 
developer may have a another answer.  I notice there is a directory in 
the contrib subdir of Etherboot for loading QNX.

I hope this is of some help.  Let us know how it goes.

Marty

---
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   Name: Marty Connor
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