Booting Fedora on an old 7248

[David Woodhouse]

On Tue, 2008-10-07 at 10:59 -0400, John W. Linville wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 07, 2008 at 02:32:08PM +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:
> > On Tue, 2008-10-07 at 07:30 -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:
> > > The B50 is a CHRP machine.  The 7248 is a PReP machine.  Fedora does
> > > not support PReP machines.  
> > 
> > It shouldn't actually be that hard. Just feed it a flattened device-tree
> > from your bootloader and it should be fine.
> 
> What PReP bootloaders exist?  When I was using my 7248 in the
> past, I always just booted a floppy that had a kernel dd'ed to it.
> Alternatively you could boot from a PReP partition (type 41) with a
> kernel dd'ed to it.

The 43p-140 is some kind of weird thing that isn't quite PReP and isn't
quite CHRP. Perhaps that's why it ran yaboot.

These days, what you'd want to do is just turn the residual data into a
flattened device-tree, then pass that to the kernel.

> I remember once thinking that implementing a yaboot- or grub-like
> bootloader for PReP might be a fun/interesting project, but the
> userbase is a bit limited and the box is a bit wimpy...
> 
> Anyway, if you know of a bootloader for PReP I'd like to hear about
> it. I imagine that you might could implement a kexec-based loader
> nowadays as an alternative.  Well, I'm rambling...

For a kexec-based bootloader which operates on a framebuffer, see
petitboot.

-- 
dwmw2