@Gunne:
Because when you make an installation medium you have to support as many drivers as possible since you do not know which hardware and software solutions the users are going to want.
Gentoo/PPC stores all modules inside the initrd image since the CD can hold several compressed environments, and if you stored the modules in there you would have to have copies of the modules available in each environment, which would waste a lot of precious space.

@Bifford:
Having some kind of menu system to control settings would be nice. The AmigaOne has something like that which you can run from the firmware prompt.

Quote:

I have been told that OF was much more modern than PC BIOS.

If there's such a limit it is also as limited as 20 years-old PC BIOS... (PC BIOS can't access RAM above the 1st 1Mb IIRC)

Leo.

dholm:

Ok, I understand this. But if Im not completely wrong I see a difference here. Maybe I got everything completely wrong ?

The Debian Sarge installer I have here also supports a lot of various PPC-platforms (chrp, Power3, Power4), including the Pegasos. But if Im not completely wrong many modules and files are loaded dependent of on which architecture you install on, and there is three different initrd images to choose from depending of on which architecture you install on.

If you have different modules for different kinds of architectures compiled into the same initrd image, it sounds for me like the initrd image will become bigger and maybe also not effective for that particular installation you intend to do.

Shouldn't Gentoo be even more flexible here, when you also compile, and perhaps then also can choose exactly what you want to compile into the kernel when you are running the installation. Perhaps you want to do a very small and simple installation, and not have much at all in the kernel.

Im sorry for asking all questions, but it seems like people are seeing things in different ways ?

and Bios:

A command for reset variables to defaults could be useful. But the difference between having a graphical environment in the firmware and a prompt, is that with a graphical environment you can only do the things thats in this graphical environment.

In the AmigaOne there is a somewhat graphics-like menu added to Uboot, but that doesn't mean you can do more in the firmware, then if this menu wasn't.

That is not a BIOS limitation. When you power up the x86 it automatically goes into real-mode. In order to access more memory you have to turn on the A20 gate which is usually done by the bootloader.
This comes from the x86 being designed in the 70:s and for some reason Intel seems to think it's a good idea that even their latest CPU:s should be fully compatible with the 8086. Personally I don't see the point of keeping an archaic design, which is why I switched to PowerPC.

Modern operating systems should not use monolithic kernels anyway. In the case of Linux, yaboot solves these problems. yaboot (or some other Linux bootloader) should eventually be ported to the Pegasos. There is no good reason not to do it, which is why I find some of the posts in this thread rather strange.

@gunne:
The Pegasos kernel on the Gentoo CD only has drivers relevant to Pegasos and I still can't fit everything I want into the initrd. Since more drivers and systems are developed all the time, the size of the kernel image will grow even more. Adding support for extremely large kernels into SmartFirmware sounds stupid to me when yaboot already solves this problem. OS-specific features such as Linux initrd image should be handled by a bootloader for that OS and not the firmware.
BTW, happy birthday Gunne.

Thank You David !

And keep up the good work with Gentoo !

Gunne

Quote:

Yeah but do you REALLY need more to boot a kernel image?

OpenFirmware basically has two requirements for the filesystem, that it can list the directory contents (and therefore FIND files) and that it can read files (possibly in many parts across large disks..)

Doing anything else is a slight security risk, wouldn't you think?

Unless yaboot has a seriously good reason to write to the disk or do ANYTHING except boot the kernel image, I'd question the need for 580kb of object code.

Neko

@Neko

Would you have any REAL simple exemple of code to give us, which would show how to create a simple text boot menu?

Thanks,
Fred

Somewhere ;)

Neko

@Neko

Is it THAT top secret? ;)

You know, I'm sure I had it on ONE of these damned USB pens :)

Neko

Linux kernel modules aren't used by yaboot at all. The modules are used by Linux and if a user wants to use XFS on his system he has to have that 580k. The yaboot module for XFS is only 10k in size.
The only time you really need to have yaboot on the Pegasos is when you have to load a really large kernel image. In most cases you can compile things as module to limit the kernel size, but if for some reason you need to put things in the initrd image you might need yaboot. One example of when a large image might be useful is the Debian net-installer kernel, it has to have enough space for both the modules and the installer.

Then we should get as many filesystems supported in OpenFirmware as possible.

And I'll try find out what this "limit" on initrd images is.

Neko

I'm waiting also some examples of Forth that can be used on Pegasos2.

Me too!

I tryed to create a 'word' MOS in this way

: MOS
> boot /pci/ide/disk@0,0:0 boot.img ramdebug
> ;

but it gives me error. Where I go wrong Neko?

I tried around with some scripts ... but stopped myself also because nothing run as exspected.
Now, honestly, it would be really and help aome little and safe example