[OLPC-devel] OLPC "bootloader"

[Jordan Crouse]

Hi Marcelo -

> I've uploaded a tarball with code to load a kernel from flash and boot
> it via the kexec() system call (ripped from kexec-tools 1.98).
> 
> http://hera.kernel.org/~marcelo/olpc/olpc-boot-loader-idea.tar.gz

Is this still what you are thinking about using to bootstrap from LinuxBIOS
to the kernel on the NAND flash?  Now that LB seems to be fairly sane, and 
we've moved to the 1MB ROM, I think its time to start pulling everything 
together.

One thing I noticed is that we need a good way to write a new image to
the NAND flash.  I'm sure this has probably been discussed in other
e-mail threads or on IRC, but as far as I know, there really isn't a
consensus on how we want to do this.

I think the initrd is as good a place to do it as any - we could pull
a new .jffs2 image from a USB key or the network (or, heaven help us,
zmodem) and write it to the MTD block.  The code isn't at all complicated,
its just a matter of agreeing on how things will be done.

Anyway, I'm going to start pulling down things and playing around a bit - 
let me know if you have anything I can help with.

Jordan

--
Jordan Crouse
Senior Linux Engineer
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
<www.amd.com/embeddedprocessors>