PPC kernels: More Pegasos II-friendly kernel config

RChan rspchan at starhub.net.sg
Mon Jul 18 02:26:17 UTC 2005


Hi,

While Pegasos II is not officially support as a PPC platform, some minor 
kernel tweaks
would make it more friendly out-of-the-box for Pegasos II hackers. Would 
the maintainers
kindly consider the following changes:

1. Kernel config
CONFIG_AMIGA_PARTITION=y
CONFIG_SERIO_I8042=y (or m)

(Pegasos II uses AMIGA partitioning and IBM AT PS/2 style mouse and 
keyboard support.)

2. (This part is hard, I'm not sure I understand the issues myself - 
it's necessary to avoid Pegasos II people
from having to rebuild from kernel source.) Pegasos II needs a 
zImage.initrd.chrp kernel to boot (i.e. a combined
zImage.chrp & initrd) instead of a separate vmlinux + initrd, therefore 
some additional object files need to be
distributed with the kernel package. I do not understand exactly why 
yaboot (patched with Amiga partition support)
does not work with separate vmlinux and initrd on Pegasos II so at the 
moment zImage.initrd.chrp is needed.

(Does this make sense?) I need a package which allows me to create a 
zImage.initrd.chrp from vmlinux and a separate
initrd. Debian has a mkvmlinuz deb which attempts to do this - it 
doesn't work for me.
Apparently, some binary .o/.a files that are created during the kernel 
build which lie in arch/ppc/boot (CHRP bootstrap, OpenFirmware
utilities) are combined with vmlinux and a ramdisk image to create 
zImage.initrd.chrp.  I'll try to analyze the build process
a bit more to see what exactly is needed to convert vmlinux + 
ramdisk.image.gz into zImage.initrd.chrp, but I thought I'd
throw this out first for the lists wisdom.

Cheers
Richard






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