Free as in speech

After adding the ability to load 64bit kernels on machines equipped with a 32bit PROM, I’ve now added initrd support to arcload.

I’ve tested that code on IP22, if you give it a go on another platform please let me know how it goes! Don’t bother with IP27, initrd is unsupported in the kernel on that one (some work required). Patches welcome if any are required.

To add an initrd to your arcload config, use the initrd keyword in the same manner you use the image keyword. And to be on the safe side, add a test entry, so that you can still boot the machine if for some reason the initrd can’t be loaded :)

I’ve produced a patch for arcboot too, so that will appear in arcboot at some point in the near future too.

For the past weeks, I’ve been working on getting an SGI Origin200 system to run Debian.

Getting a working kernel for the machine took some time and lead to the discovery of 2 nasty bugs, which will be fixed in 2.6.23 thanks to Ralf Baechle (who found and fixed both bugs). There’s still some work left but the machine is in a usable state, except for a dead eth1 interface.

Now I’m having some fun with the bootloader, namely ARCLoad in this case. ARCLoad supports all the Linux-supported SGI MIPS machines, but couldn’t load 64bit kernels on machines equipped with a 32bit PROM; all Debian kernels for SGI MIPS machines have been 64bit for some time now, so that means ARCLoad was unusable with these machines (note that the Origin200 comes with a 64bit PROM, so this wasn’t a showstopper for this project).

Thankfully another bootloader, arcboot, is used for these machines and supports 64bit kernels. Stealing a snippet of code from arcboot I’ve now uploaded arcload 0.5-5 which fully covers our needs. The joy of free software.

I’ve also been working on getting the latest rEFIt version to build with GNU EFI, which means updating GNU EFI to efi110. Took some time, but everything built in the end. I haven’t tested the resulting rEFIt binary yet, waiting some feedback from GNU EFI uptream before doing so.

I’ve just released pommed v1.9, which adds an idle timer for the keyboard backlight. It’ll save some battery, it’s nice if you’re watching a movie or something and it reportedly behaves like OS X :-)

Download at the usual place on Alioth, Debian mirrors at the next push.