Re: kernel 2.6.x on IBM thin client 8363

From: Hans-Jürgen Lange
Date: Sat Jan 07 2006 - 05:09:30 EST


Randy.Dunlap wrote:
On Fri, 06 Jan 2006 10:13:31 +0100 Hans-Jürgen Lange wrote:


Randy.Dunlap wrote:

On Thu, 05 Jan 2006 13:16:28 +0100 Hans-Jürgen Lange wrote:



Hello,

I would like to run a 2.6.x kernel on a IBM thin client 8363. There are patches available for the 2.4 series of kernels.
I had a look on these patches and the only thing they do is to expand the kernel commandline size to 512 Bytes and a change in arch/i386/kernel/head.S that changed the pointer to the commandline to a fixed address.


Where are these 2.4 patches that you are referring to?


O.K. this is the very important one. Because without it the 8363 wont start.


Sorry, I have no idea about this patch.
Where did you get these 2.4 patches? are there others?


These are original IBM patches to the linux kernel to get the kernel running on there thin client. There are some others, which fixes some oddities in the hardware. The thin client is about 99% pc compatible. It lacks of a realtime clock, so IBM has a patch to get the time from within the NFS protocol.
There are some more but they are not importent to get the kernel up and running.

It looks a little like it may be dependent on your boot loader.
What boot loader are you using?


The boot process is very different and has nothing to do with that one on a PC. The method I use mounts a NFS share, downloads the kernel and does the unmount. Afterwards the kernel gets started.
The kernel commandline parameters are passed from within the firmware.
Besides, the firmware itself is aware that it has to load a linux kernel.
The patch below sets a fixed value for the address where the commandline resides. This is not my problem to understand.

But to transfer this handling to the 2.6. kernel I need a real understanding of how the 2.4 kernel does commandline handling and how it has changed in 2.6 kernels. Then it seems possible to change the 2.6 startup code to get the 2.6 kernel running on a 8363 Thin-Client.



--- linux/arch/i386/kernel/head.S.orig Mon Jul 16 16:13:11 2001
+++ linux/arch/i386/kernel/head.S Mon Jul 16 16:14:26 2001
@@ -158,7 +158,10 @@
movl $512,%ecx
rep
stosl
- movl SYMBOL_NAME(empty_zero_page)+NEW_CL_POINTER,%esi
+/* NetVista */
+/* movl SYMBOL_NAME(empty_zero_page)+NEW_CL_POINTER,%esi */
+ movl $0x98000, %esi
+
andl %esi,%esi
jnz 2f # New command line protocol
cmpw $(OLD_CL_MAGIC),OLD_CL_MAGIC_ADDR



---
~Randy





BR
Hans-Juergen Lange
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