Re: network Booting ELKS as a pre-boot environment?

[Gero Kuhlmann <gero@gkminix.han.de>]

Hello,

Martin Atkins <martin@cs.york.ac.uk> wrote:
> Has anyone thought about/tried network booting the ELKS
> (non-protect mode 8086-compatible Linux subset kernel/system)
> and using this as a pre-boot environment?

Thought about it, yes, but not much else...

> The biggest difficulty I can see is getting ELKS to co-exist with
> the bootrom image/memory layout, and be able to call back to it
> to continue the boot. Presumably it would also have to make calls
> to the boot image's ethernet driver (rather than using native elks
> drivers) using a dummy driver, so that it would be possible to
> return to the rom image and carry on.

With the PXE support in the netboot bootrom it should be possible to
attach a dummy driver easily to the bootrom network driver. However,
this sounds like ELKS will require a whole bunch of changes, and I haven't
looked at ELKS that close yet.

gero.

-- 
We all worry about the population explosion -- but we don't worry about it at
the right time.			- Arthur Hoppe
--
Gero Kuhlmann, Hannover     0511/6497525 (Voice)        gero@gkminix.han.de
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