Re: NSLU2 won't boot 5.0

[Donald T Hayford <don%donhayford.com@localhost>]

Andy Ruhl wrote:
> Yes, it wasn't clear to me that you can't watch the kernel boot over a
> telnet session. Now I know. Maybe I'll put a serial port in it so I
> can see it.
>
> Do we know why it won't show bootup messages over the telnet session?
> Is that a RedBoot limitation or a NetBSD problem?
>   
Once you type 'G', everything that happens is NetBSD.  So this is a 
NetBSD limitation.  Though I'm not sure limitation is the right word.  
Your telnet session is with Redboot, and NetBSD doesn't know anything 
about it.  And generally your network address changes once you load 
NetBSD, so your old session shouldn't work anyway.  Though I suppose you 
could pass some data to NetBSD indirectly through the environment stored 
in flash.
>   
> >   One potential difficulty (though I've never checked it out) is that the
> > Slug is big-endian and a UFS disk written with a little-endian system (i386)
> > may not work.  I know I had to enable the bi-endian file system (options
> > FFS_EI) in the Slug configuration file when building the install kernel
> > since crunchgen was running on a little-endian system.
> >     
>
> I didn't realize that filesystems in NetBSD had the endian problem
> (actually, that the kernel couldn't handle it), but I guess I do see
> that there is the FFS_EI option.
>
>   
I don't know if it's a problem or not.  I'm just mentioning the possibility.
> >   One thing I have only played with a little is putting a kernel into flash.
> >  Which is where we really want to go.  I've gotten a bootable, gzipped
> > kernel down to 800 kB or so, but don't know anything about unzipping and
> > sticking it into the right memory location.  I'm interested enough to have a
> > go at it if anybody can point the way.
> >     
>
> I think we really need a bootloader... But I'm not sure if any of the
> NetBSD secondary boot loaders can understand USB? Could a small boot
> kernel find USB storage and then boot a kernel from it maybe? I don't
> know if the Linux bootloaders understand USB or are working on arm
> either...
>   
I'm intrigued by Open Firmware, which is used by the OLPC to boot up.  
It definitely understands USB.  And it's very small.  Somebody else uses 
it.  Oh, yeah, Apple. :-)
> You've been a big help, thanks.
>   
Nada.  What I really want to hear is that you got your slug to boot up.
Regards,
Don