Re: Debian-installer, older hardware, boot loaders, miboot & amiboot & .. (original) (raw)

Sven Luther sven.luther@wanadoo.fr writes:

On Tue, Mar 30, 2004 at 10:36:20AM +0200, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:

Sven Luther sven.luther@wanadoo.fr writes:

On Sun, Mar 28, 2004 at 10:30:23PM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:

Sven Luther wrote: Yes, that's somewhat more of an issue. I'd expect amiboot to be buildable without excessive effort, although the Amiga includes aren't Free. We can't really ship amiboot as part of d-i anyway - it's a loadlin equivilent, not a syslinux one. Amiga-lilo used to exist and

Amiga-lilo had afaik no support for graphics crads and probably no 060 support.

The main difference being that all the stuff needed are part of the amiga rom, while this is not the case for msdos, if i remember well.

The rom and system header files are part of the hardware/operating system. Iirc the 'syscall' numbers and parameter format is shiped with the Amiga Basic. If pulling a few function offsets needed for amiboot (a few '#define open_library -236') out of a hat isn't legally good enough, they could be extracted from there. That should cover the legal side even if the C header are not falling under the "distributed with the OS" part. They can also be taken out of the many programming books or for Amigas.

Well, the FSF folk told me that header files containing this kind of info cause no problem, provided you write it yourself, and strip the comments. At least this was the case for the amiga RDB code i contributed to libparted (and assigned copyright to the FSF), so i guess they know what they are talking about.

Good. Tell me if you need any of them (re)written. I have the Amiga RKRM Books and could type in the needed offsets.

I think that the easiest way would be to have a amiga bootable partition, with amiboot and the auto-executing amiga shell script needed to launch it. This may all be installable from linux, provided either i finish the affs create implementation in libparted, or we package Roman Zippel's mkaffs. This would be a rather clean way of doing this, and you can even rely on the early amiga-rom based boot selector, and play with boot priorities to have it auto loaded or go to amiga os.

You need a RGDB, which parted can create, a OFS formated partition (or

which parted can create now :)

OFS? Can linux even mount that?

the l:filesystem) for old roms (newer roms have affs), the shell script, the amiboot, the 68040.library or the 68060.library + 68040dummy.library, the setpatch and the device driver for various graphics cards.

Um, those libraries are probably non-free. Or possibly in accelerator boards flash roms ? No static linking is possible ?

Absolutly non-free. Not in the flash rom. The Installer could ask for the installation floppies, if users still have working ones.

Forget about booting linux without going through the already installed AmigaOS. The best you can do is clone the existing system into a new boot partition or provide an Amiga Installer script to aid installing under nativ AmigaOS (which is actually quite easy to write).

BTW, could you test the new apus kernels (2.4.25) on your apus box ?

Friendly,

Sven Luther

Given that apusboot allways hangs on my board I can't. For what I figured out I have to flush the bios and never dared to do so.

MfG Goswin

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