Booting from DOC Millenium

[jasmine at linuxgrrls.org]

On Mon, 11 Oct 2004, Esben Nielsen wrote:

> 1)  Have a small bootsector and used a compressed kernel in the 1Mb NOR.

This is a common strategy.

> 2) Get a bootsector which can read the kernel from the filesystem on the 
>    DOC.  Is there any such bootsector anywhere?

GRUB can do this.  If you're on a non-Intel platform, there are other
bootloaders that could be persuaded to do this.

> 3) Go for a 3 stage boot: Have a small bootsector which boots a small, 
>    never changed Linux kernel from the 1Mb NOR. That small kernel does 
>    one thing: read out the real kernel from the DOC. Do anyone have 
>    experience with such a strategy?

LinuxBIOS does this.

> 4) Use a small Linux as a bootsector. Compile the initial hardware setup 
>    in before decompression and instead of starting initrd make something 
>    like "kexec" to start the real, runtime kernel. Has anyone been 
>    playing with this?

...that's functionally the same as (3) above.

> Having to have a seperate bootsector for Linux is not very good. We 
> otherwise use VxWorks here.

Grub et al. can boot VxWorks.

-J.