[ECOS] Problems booting RedBoot from GRUB & using the monitor display

["Gabor Madl" <amfromcali at gmail dot com>]

Hi Everyone,


I'm trying to compile RedBoot to boot from GRUB and output to the
monitor on my laptop. I have no floppy drives (or serial ports) so the
supported method of booting from a disk does not work for me. During
this process I have encountered some problems & I couldn't get RedBoot
to work this way.

First I've created the .ecc file for redboot:

$ mkdir redboot_pc_grub
$ cd redboot_pc_grub
$ ecosconfig new pc redboot

Then I have imported the $ECOS_REPOSITORY/hal/i386/pc
/current/misc/redboot_GRUB.ecm file using configtool, and I've set
Default console channel and Diagnostic serial port to 2 (in eCos
HAL/i386 Architecture/i386 PC Target), and built redboot (F7).

I've tried the process above using a recent CVS snapshot as well as
version 2.0. In version 2.0 I've used the same redboot_GRUB.ecm file
from the CVS, except that I've commented out:

#cdl_option CYGSEM_HAL_ROM_MONITOR {
#    user_value 1
#};

to prevent some conflicts in the configuration.

The redboot.elf that I've compiled using the 2.0 source code starts up
but hangs when I try to load the 'hello' example from my Linux
partition (load -mode disk hda3:/path/hello). I've built hello to
start from RAM for this experiment. However, I have noticed that
several patches have been applied to this code since then to allow
GRUB booting so I assume this is not expected to work.

The redboot.elf that I've built using the recent CVS snapshot does not
output anything to the monitor (except a single line for a few
microseconds - something like <0x0000..., so I assume it does
something...),  and since I have no serial ports on my laptop I do not
know whether it works at all. This is rather unfortunate because the
redboot monitor output worked fine in the 2.0 version, but not in the
recent version. Am I missing something here?

I've also compiled the hello examples using both versions (2.0 and
current) to boot from GRUB and both of them work fine from GRUB.
However, I'd like to get them to work from RedBoot (using RAM startup)
as well. Does anyone have any suggestions what I'm missing to get
RedBoot (preferably the current version) to boot from GRUB and use the
monitor display?

Thanks,
Gabe

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