Re: Boot from DoC2000

[Russ Dill <Russ.Dill@asu.edu>]

On Thu, 2002-05-09 at 02:40, Darren Martz wrote:
> I'm new to linux, so my questions may seem rather simplistic <g>
> 
> Sorry for the multiple questions, I have read most of the papers and
> many of the posting on this list but these are missing pieces...
> 
> It seems the m-sys driver adds logic to the bios gaining access to the
> DoC. The mtd solution everyone is working so hard on seems to do things
> differently, but I'm not sure how or what.  I am also unclear as to what
> boot loaders support this new way to boot an mtd device. I understand
> grub is designed to support that scenario but is still in development.
> Does the lilo solution rely on the m-sys patch?
> 
> I suppose a boot loader like grub is required because the bios doesn't
> support native access to the device(s).
> 
> So what filesystem options are there? I know that m-sys has their own
> "TrueFFS" fs, and it requires a kernel patch. Being new to linux, I'd
> like to stay away from that for the time being. I have read about jffs1
> and jffs2, and from what I can tell jffs1 is stable but lacking the nice
> features, while jffs2 is very much experimental but coming along nicely.
> 
> Knowing all that, the options seem to be as follows:
> 
> 1) LILO plus an m-sys patch with the TrueFFS or any other filesystem
> 2) GRUB with any filesystem including JFFS, but not TrueFFS
> 3) SYSLINUX ??? i suspect is not supported
> 
> I believe I read that to date, nobody has had a successful boot on a DoC
> with grub - yet! 
> So does that leave the only current option as LILO with the m-sys patch?

look at the mailing list archives, grub works great on a DOC. jffs2 (or
jffs) is not ready for use on a DOC, but its close, so you'd have to use
a standard filesystem on top of NFTL.

actually, syslinux works fine with the original m-sys "firmware"