[syslinux] Request for enlightenment..

[H. Peter Anvin]

Ian McDonald wrote:
> H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>> Ian McDonald wrote:
>>> I did kind of wonder if there was a way of getting the kernel to look at 
>>> the bios information.
>> Nope.  A MEMDISK-on-Linux driver could be written, but there has been
>> zero interest so far.  Also, using memdisk to boot Linux is rather silly.
> 
> I know it's a wee bit strange, but I was rather taken by the idea of 
> being able to just build a small linux install in vmware, make 
> modifications to it as a running system, then boot said installation 
> trivially using memdisk, having dd'd a copy of the disk (from a pxelinux 
> image we use for our deployment system already).
> 
> I'll just build a kernel, and use a large initrd as I've done in the 
> past, but that has the disadvantage of not being so easily modifiable as 
>   a "running" install. What I'm attempting to do is build a small linux 
> PXE-able system so I can apply a SAS backplane firmware update to a Dell 
> 2950 which is running neither Windows, nor Linux. I've used memdisk for 
> many moons to punt dos images at servers for updates, but for some 
> reason this binary update needs Windows or "RedHat" (and a great list of 
> dependencies, which would be more difficult to resolve on a non-running 
> system).

Joy.

As I said, a driver could be written (actually, writing it as some kind
of plugin to the Linux MTD driver would probably work.)

However, for most Linux uses, you're better off using a kernel+initramfs.

	-hpa