From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <39D122E3.608630C5@mvista.com> Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 18:27:47 -0400 From: Dan Malek MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Neil Russell CC: Ruedi.Hofer@ascom.ch, linuxppc-embedded@lists.linuxppc.org, kernel@linux01.hasler.ascom.ch Subject: Re: Limon & PowerQUICC II, Booting the kernel References: <0G1H00EA2SVED4@pmdf-it.hasler.ascom.ch> <20000926091205.A22470@lx.c-side.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: owner-linuxppc-embedded@lists.linuxppc.org List-Id: Neil Russell wrote: > The downloaded kernel can be 4M-1K (0x3ffc00) in size, so I don't bother > with compressing it. Yes, please bother compressing it. Making zImage is more than just compressing the file. The code in arch/ppc/mbxboot will (interactively) create the command line, properly allocate the initial ram disk, and most importantly creates the board information structure that is required by the kernel. There is also hardware initialization expected by the kernel that is often coordinated in the various functions found in the arch/ppc/mbxboot files. You can't simply boot vmlinux on an embedded system and expect it to work (unless your boot rom is doing exactly the functions of arch/ppc/mbxboot). The ELF header of the resulting zImage should be removed by just using 'dd': dd if=zImage bs=64k skip=1 of=zImage.bin Using objcopy or other generic programs on zImage will likely result in a mess, because the file isn't really a valid ELF image. > limon uses an enhanced version of the bootinfo structure (not the same as > bd_info). The kernel expects a board info that matches what it was configured to use. Every board is different. You should modify arch/ppc/mbxboot/misc.c to know it was called by limon and properly convert or discover information necessary for the kernel version of the structure. -- Dan ** Sent via the linuxppc-embedded mail list. See http://lists.linuxppc.org/