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Re: RedBoot and other companies OS products


> (Assuming this is x86)
>
> Yes it can be done, although you must still have a BIOS - no-one has so far
> been willing to fund a version of RedBoot that can boot Linux with no BIOS,
> even though it should be comparitively easy.

To reiterate, this is actually what I've been up to. Although, it still
relies on LinuxBIOS (www.linuxbios.org) for chipset specific instructions,
attached below is an email I sent out to the LinuxBIOS list, which
includes a romimage one could use directly on a board based on the SiS630
chipset (www.aaronix.com is one place to buy such a board for around $60
if anyone actually cares). Or, you could recompile LinuxBIOS for any of
its other supported chipsets. Initial results show that ide access and pci
devices didn't work though, so i'm looking into how I can fix that.
Basically, I'm a college student who's only employeed to do this for 20
hours a week, so if anyone is interested, their help would definitly be
appreciated.

BTW, could you tell me Jonathan how much it actually costs to get this
kind of work done?

- Adam


>From agnew@www.missl.cs.umd.edu Wed Sep 19 12:16:06 2001
Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2001 11:18:23 -0400 (EDT)
From: Adam Agnew <agnew@www.missl.cs.umd.edu>
To: linuxbios@lanl.gov
Subject: Re: Forcing on IDE controllers in LinuxBIOS for SiS630


Erm, anyway. I have my initial success in getting RedBoot to run from
LinuxBIOS on the SiS630 in a 256k part. What I'm missing now is hard drive
support, although RedBoot's ide drivers should be completely polled, I'm
having trouble forcing the controller on.

http://www.missl.cs.umd.edu/~agnew/
There you will find:
romimage - 256K flash image for RedBoot running under LinuxBIOS
redboot.ebi - elf boot image to be attempted on other chipsets as well
fixedredboot.cap - minicom log of the boot up as it is now
redboot_LINUXBIOS.ecm - redboot config script
winfast.config - linuxbios config script
southbridge.c - my attempt at forcing the ide controllers on, as pulled
		from tiara

Please take a look and if you're interested lend a hand. More information
about RedBoot can be obtained at http://sources.redhat.com/redboot .


On Fri, 14 Sep 2001, Adam Agnew wrote:

>
> As I'm working on a bootloader as an elf image to be loaded through
> LinuxBIOS, I need to get the IDE controllers on. For a few chipsets
> (m1535, vt8231, vt82c686, m1631) this is done in LinuxBIOS, but for SiS630
> it's done as a patch to the kernel. Is there a reason it has to be done
> that way? I've tried forcing on the controller with
> pci_write_config_byte(pcidev, 0x4A, 0xE6);
> (values were ripped from what the linux kernel detects for the sis630)
> but that doesn't seem to work.
> So two questions,
> Is there a way to detect if the IDE controller is on?
> Is there a better way to do this?
>
> - adam
>
>





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