Partitioning under Linux?

[Mitch Bradley]

MARTIN WOODHOUSE wrote:
> Hello Mitch and thanks for the info, which tells me a whole lot of 
> things I needed to know.
>  
> I guess what I really need to know is whether, if MSDOS (or FreeDOS) 
> were to be loaded onto the (existing) XO, it would then be possible to 
> run an MSDO-based application on that machine?

DOS won't work very well because we don't support conventional EGA-style 
display access.  The stuff that is in the "DOS hole" (addresses 
0xa0000..0xfffff) is just not present.  There is only memory there.


>  
> Cheers,  Martin
>
> */Mitch Bradley <wmb at firmworks.com>/* wrote:
>
>
>
>     MARTIN WOODHOUSE wrote:
>     > Hello All
>     >
>     > ( C'est moi, the Ancient Mariner, again .. . )
>     >
>     > Is it possible to partition a hard drive under LinuxBIOS? I assume
>     > it is, but I need to be sure. If so, can both drives be made
>     bootable?
>
>     Linux can create partitions on, for example, USB hard drives, and
>     Open
>     Firmware can boot from multiple partitions. We don't encourage it
>     because partitions just make all the procedures more complicated. The
>     documentation can easily become bewildering in the face of different
>     partitions and filesystem types and whatnot.
>
>     With the current software, it is not possible to partition the
>     internal
>     NAND FLASH, which is the main storage medium that the children
>     will use.
>
>     The OLPC bootloader is Open Firmware, not LinuxBIOS. The information
>     about LinuxBIOS on the wiki is somewhat out of date. Strictly
>     speaking,
>     LinuxBIOS has never been the bootloader. When we used LinuxBIOS,
>     it was
>     used for low-level hardware initialization. LinuxBIOS depends on a
>     separate "payload" program to do bootloading from disks. In general,
>     that payload can be a dedicated bootloader like GRUB or LILO, a
>     stripped-down Linux system "Linux as Bootloader", or Open Firmware.
>     From a few months starting in August of last year, OLPC used
>     LinuxBIOS
>     + Linux-as-Bootloader. Towards the end of 2006, we switched to
>     LinuxBIOS+OpenFirmware. The current scheme, beginning with the
>     recently-release C-series firmware, is OpenFirmware with table-driven
>     early initialization.
>
>
>
>     >
>     > Cheers and love, Martin.
>     >
>     ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>     >
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