RE: Boot from DoC2000

["Darren Martz" <dmartz@shelbrook.com>]

That makes much more sense, you explained it very well - thanks David!

I'm going to push on with grub using the NFTL and ext2.

My PC/104 board has an older/patched version of lilo and linux on it,
how do I replace the current lilo firmware? I have already formatted the
device from a floppy boot (may that wasn't so smart). Can I install grub
over top of the existing lilo by bootdisk, or do I need to uninstall
lilo first?

So far I have downloaded grub 0.92, ran "configure" and "make" on my
desktop-pc. I put the stage1 and stage2 files using dd, as the manual
indicates, on a floppy and successfully booted the PC/104 board... but I
am having troubles figuring out how to access the DoC or to install grub
on the device. Is there a document that covers most/part of this? I am
assuming the 0.92 build has DoC support.

Darren

-----Original Message-----
From: linux-mtd-admin@lists.infradead.org
[mailto:linux-mtd-admin@lists.infradead.org] On Behalf Of David
Woodhouse

You're a little confused. There are two options for the physical format
on 
the DiskOnChip. First, there's 'NFTL', which is what M-Systems refer to
as 
'TrueFFS', which emulates a block device. On top of that block device
you 
put a normal filesystem -- VFAT, ext2 or whatever you prefer.

You need support for that in two places - both in your bootloader which
has 
to load the kernel off it, and in your kernel which has to actually
_use_ 
it. Just to add to the confusion, for _each_ of those requirements you
have 
a choice of two methods.

The kernel part is simple - either you use their binary-only module with
an 
initrd hack to get it loaded, or you use the GPL'd support for NFTL
which 
is included in the official 2.4 kernel tree.

The bootloader part is only slightly less simple. The DiskOnChip ships
with 
firmware built-in that hooks into the INT 13h disk BIOS interrupt, to
make 
it look like a normal hard disk driver to DOS and LILO. If you want, you

can replace their firmware with Grub. To make that useful, you have to
have 
a copy of Grub which is capable of reading the DiskOnChip directly, as 
you're going to have taken away the INT 13h support.

Alternatively, you can use JFFS2 on the DiskOnChip. You need to fix up
the 
DiskOnChip hardware drivers a little to handle reads and writes larger
than 
512 bytes; nothing else that I recall. Booting a kernel on a JFFS2 file 
system on DiskOnChip is not yet implemented. I'd be inclined to use
RedBoot 
for that.

--
dwmw2