Fun with bootloaders
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.