[openbeos] Re: x86 boot loader milestone
- From: Simon Taylor <simontaylor1@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2004 11:43:50 +0000
> Hi there,
>
> The IA32 boot loader bindings are now mature enough to boot OpenBeOS
> from a hard drive if the BIOS supports LBA access (which should be
> supported by every BIOS for some years now).
Wow. Fantastic news Axel, you've made my day :D
A few milestones seem to have been hit lately, great work everyone!
> The kernel itself doesn't have hard drive access yet, so it will panic
> soon after (which is the intended behaviour at this point).
>
> Since our build system still builds a kernel using the old style boot
> process, here is a short description of how to check, if the boot
> process is working on your system as well:
>
> 1) choose a spare hard drive partition; if it's a BeOS installation,
> you will render it useless by following the steps below!!!
> The partition must be bootable, that is, it must contain a valid BFS
> boot block, and you have to be able to choose that partition to boot
> from (i.e. in the installed boot manager).
> 2) build the boot loader:
> $ cd <path-to-open-beos-repository>/current/
> $ jam boot_loader
> 3) build the kernel:
> $ jam kernel
> 4) create zbeos:
> $ objcopy -O binary objects/x86.R1/kernel/boot_loader zbeos
> 5) copy the files to your spare disk:
> $ mkdir -p /my-openbeos-disk/beos/system
> $ cp zbeos /my-openbeos-disk/beos/system/
> $ cp objects/x86.R1/kernel/kernel /my-openbeos-disk/beos/system/
> 6) done. Reboot your system and select this partition to boot from. The
> last line you read on the screen should be something like:
> kernel entry at x
> (if you have a serial connected terminal, you will find yourself in the
> kernel debugger because there could not be found any "bootdir" )
>
> You can also install it on a BFS image containing a valid boot block,
> and boot it using Bochs. Just make sure that you reboot after you've
> copied the files and unmounted the image, and before using Bochs to
> avoid a bug in the BeOS cache.
Would it be a long, hard process to get jam to make such a BFS image for
testing purposes? That would be great.
The kernel is still in early pre-alpha according to the projet status stage. I
realise these steps don't match the kernel very well, as NewOS itself is fairly
stable. I assume you won't consider the OpenBeOS kernel alpha until it is
feature complete with the BeOS kernel, and then it should progress through the
various stages quite quickly?
Just trying to understand what is left to do so I can have a better idea of the
overall status of the project.
Again, great work! Looking forward to R1 :D
Simon
-----------------------------------------
Email provided by http://www.ntlhome.com/
Other related posts:
