booting the kernel when ia32 processor is already in protected

Lincoln Dale (ltd@interlink.com.au)
Thu, 19 Aug 1999 22:27:10 -0700


[wondering if anyone has tried this before]

i've got a computer that has (already built-in) an impressive bootstrap-loader.
it can load an image from disk, network (rcp, ftp, tftp) or from flash.

here's the caveat: it is a vxworks boot loader.

it can load a Linux kernel (provided it is a raw ELF file, such as that
normally kept in arch/i386/boot/compress/bvmlinux), and execute at the
appropriate place (0x100000).

unfortunately, the processor is already in protected-mode by the time the
linux kernel starts running. this is where things 'stop'.

anyone have any clues as to how one would get it working?
it'd be a shame to have to remove the bootstrap loader that already exists
-- re-creating the same functionality would be painful.

cheers,

lincoln.

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