Re: Etherboot 4.6.4 released

[sl@whiskey.fireplug.net (Stuart Lynne)]

In article <200007241255.OAA01870@shadow.han.de>,
Ken Yap <netboot@baghira.han.de> wrote:
>I have released Etherboot 4.6.4 at http://etherboot.sourceforge.net/
>
>Only a few changes this release:
>
>+ Marty Connor contributed patches to tulip.c to support the LinkSys
>LNE100TX v4 NICs.
>
>+ Added rmrd.com to mknbi-1.0 directory.
>
>+ Added experimental changes to allow RELOCADDR to be changed to 0x88000
>to avoid Disk On Chip drivers. See RELNOTES and Makefile for details.

I've just spent a few weeks poking and proding lilo and syslinux to make
sure they work with the DOC BIOS extension firmware. 

Moving somewhere else isn't sufficent. You have to avoid clobbering the
BIOS extension when loading the kernel boot sectors and command line
(usually done at 0x90000). 

HP Anvin has implemented a new boot command line protocol that seems to
fix this problem. It is in the current 2.4.0-pretest versions. And there
is a backport of it to 2.2.17 (although Alan Cox is not including it yet).

This patch allows the command line information to be passed as a 32bit pointer
instead of an offset in 0x90000. 

Upgrading the netboot loader to load the kernel boot sectors and command lin 
low, the kernel image high, and passing the command line information as 
appropriate *should* fix the problem.

The tricky bit is that you have to inspect the kernel header to see which 
protocol it is expecting and then use either the new or old (and if the old
try and avoid 0x90000 until the last possible moment, then cross your fingers
and hope for the best...)

Network booting tends to be done with customized versions of everything so
I suspect that anyone who really needs to support this combination wouldn't
have a problem getting their kernel patched etc.

-- 
                                            __O 
Fireplug - a Lineo company                _-\<,_ 
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Stuart Lynne <sl@fireplug.net>       www.fireplug.net        604-461-7532
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