Re: [Etherboot-developers] Etherboot 5.1.2rc7 released

[Doug A. <amb...@am...>]

Eric W. Biederman writes:
| I don't know if anyone has done an i845E port yet, but I don't
| see it in the tree.  I am just polishing off the iE7500 port.
| Component wise that should be very similiar.  
| 
| The tricky thing with FreeBSD has been that LinuxBIOS has a table
| of values it provides the kernel, and then it loads an ELF formated
| image (normally etherboot) that boots the kernel.  People who have
| looked at FreeBSD report that it then goes and attempts to make
| BIOS calls.  Since BIOS calls tends to be one of the buggiest parts
| of the BIOS I don't LinuxBIOS currently does not implement them.

Hmm, are the trying to boot a FreeBSD kernel or go through a disk based
boot strap?  I can see BIOS issues with the normal disk based boot
up to the 3rd stage loader.  However it shouldn't be hard to just load
the kernel and then boot start that.  There might be a couple assumptions
but I haven't looked at the kernel start code for a while.

I don't know how well you can read a kernel of a ufs file system.
I think we can read and write to ext2fs so that should be able
to bring in the kernel.  Probably the best way would be use LinuxBIOS
to pull in the kernel via Etherboot since Etherboot nows most of the 
magic to start FreeBSD.

I saw you had support for some SIS630 we have some Asus CUSI/TUSI 
motherboards here that use the SIS630E chip.  I don't see that in the 
short list.  Problem is that those flash chips are soldered on.  The
i845E board we have our socketed.  So recovering a bad BIOS is easier.

Doug A.