Re: On or Off Topic Also Re: [cobalt-developers] problems booting the redhat 7.3 kernel ona raq3

["John P. Looney" <valen@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Aug 14, 2002 at 09:47:23PM -0700, William L. Thomson Jr. mentioned:
> Basically to the point should this list be development of/on Sun/Cobalt
> appliances, or development of/on Sun Linux equipment.

 Well, seeing as this list seems to be used by people that know the
insides of cobalt's hardware & software, as well as people needing that
information - anything of interest to those types of people would be
on-topic, yes ?

 (you guys should see some of the OT'ness of the Irish Linux User Group
list - 800 people and no one can keep a topic linux-oriented for more than
3 posts).

> Now back to the RedHat related porting issues using a RaQ, I am curious
> and interested. Not to mention would like to see or hear of someone
> succeeding in doing it. So I welcome that discussion and questions to
> the list, and second Jeff's comments below.

 Well, thanks to that excellent article on gurulabs, I did succeed - it
wasn't immensely difficult actually. My main source of pain is that the
prom's functionality is poorly documented, as far as I can tell, and
people seem to be in disagreement as to how much of it could work.

 Hence I can't use the initrd, and thus can't stop the prom booting off
/dev/hda2 and somehow holding it open, so the Linux RAID software won't
add it to a mirror once the system is booting, and has mounted /dev/md0
(as opposed to hda2) as root.

 Hats off to the developers that got their patches into the standard
kernel (or is it just in the redhat kernel at the moment ?), and that new
prom that'll boot a 2.4 kernel.

 I'd actually appreciate it if someone could explain how the raq boots, in
it's early stages. As far as I can tell, it does:

    POST
    Looks for space to be pressed
    checks /dev/XX (as mentioned in "set_boot_device") for a /boot/vmlinux.gz
    Loads it into ram, uncompresses it
    Boots that kernel, passing it "console=ttyS0,115200 ip=off"
    The kernel assumes root is /dev/XX as it's not told otherwise

 Now, I don't see how lilo fits into this picture.

Kate