Re: LinuxAPUS on a Power Flyer?

[Geert U. <ge...@li...>]

On Fri, 8 Feb 2002, Alan Buxey wrote:
> > Let me start off by first apologising for the question I
> > am about to ask. I'm sure this has been asked many times
> > before.
> 
> it has...but the FAQ is like a famous parrot. I'm looking
> into replacement as now an important urgency
>  
> > When I last tried LinusAPUS (during the AmigaActive
> > articles), it did'nt look like it was possible to boot
> > from an HD on an A1200 Power Flyer interface. I don't
> > have any other HD's on the internal IDE or on my SCSI.
> > So, has anything now changed to allow me to boot up
> > LinuxAPUS? If so, can you provide details please.
> 
> first the 'bad news', no, PowerFlyer isnt supported by the kernel.
> 
> but now the 'good news'. Through a fortunate bit of hardware
> design, if you DONT INITIALISE the powerflyer the first channel
> (IDE0) appears just like the plain Gayle controller and we've
> got reports that it works okay by several users. 
> 
> ie boot from cold with no startup and you should be able to run a
> bootstrap command to boot into Linux.  Only be able to access the
> first two units though.

Is this such a `magic interface' that connects to the A1200 Gayle IDE
connector, and provides access to another 2 IDE devices? Or is it a Zorro board
(i.e. it shows up in /proc/bus/zorro/)?

If it's the former, you can probably find the other IDE chain at an offset very
similar to the offset of the Gayle IDE port. In fact there's room for a second
IDE port in the A1200 memory map.

Is there an easy way to detect a PowerFlyer?

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

						Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- ge...@li...

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
							    -- Linus Torvalds