On Sun, Jun 01, 2003 at 02:57:07PM +0100, Leigh Brown wrote:

Ethan Benson said:

quoted

On Sat, May 31, 2003 at 09:36:41PM +0100, Leigh Brown wrote:

quoted

[If you bore easily:
http://www.solinno.co.uk/leigh/pablo/pablo-0.2.tar.gz ]

Ever since I got Linux going on my PReP box I've been unhappy about
the boot loader. There is no lilo or yaboot equivalent for PReP and
it's a pain. For the past several months I've been trying to devise
a way of making a bootloader similar to lilo or yaboot, and this is
the best I've been able to come up with.

I have been working (slowly due to lack of time) on a complete
rewrite of yaboot, the plan is for it to support any OF based
hardware (not limited to powerpc), and to design it in a general way
so it can accomidate the various ways different architectures boot.

to start with im writing a prom-libc library so all the usual stdc
stuff doesn't have to be reinvented crappilly like every other
loader seems to do, as well as get the prom specific stuff out of
bootloaders and into a common place (it also should allow for a
bootloader which is designed well enough to be more easily portable
to different prom types so long as prom-libc has support). it will
also allow the bootloader to be written much more like ordinary unix
C programs, making them more portable (don't port the loader, port
prom-libc).

my goal is to eliminate the need for a different bootloader for
every variation of hardware, i particularly hate how there is a
dozen different loaders all with different user interfaces just for
powerpc, much less other architectures.

Unfortunately I think a PReP boot loader is largely orthogonal to an
OF based loader. Even PReP boxes that have OF don't support enough
services for yaboot (in any form) to work. Most PReP boxes don't have
OF or even allow any firmware calls from within the boot loader. With
PReP everything you need to bring up the O/S has to be held on the
boot partition and loaded into memory at boot time.

then why do you have a of1275 interface in your loader?

basically prep OF is more broken then apple's oldworld? now thats
impressive...

--
Ethan Benson
http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/

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