Re: [Etherboot-developers] Etherboot 5.1.2rc7 released

[<ebi...@ln...>]

Doug Ambrisko <amb...@am...> writes:

> 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.

Currently I have the information second or third hand, but I believe
the issues were with the kernel start code.  I think I have heard
it goes into vm86 mode and makes BIOS calls.  Though I do not
remember the specifics, and the people doing the looking gave up
a while ago.
 
> 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 agree.
 
> 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.

Quite true.  The SIS630 is a highly integrated solution so one BIOS
works on practically everything.  But if the board is not supported
it will probably fail.

Eric