Porting linux to i386 but non-pc platform

Feb 10, 2004 6 Replies

Hello,



I'm trying to port linux to an i386 board. The problem is that this board is not a PC, so not all pc-devices are available. Most of them are, like the serial ports and the interrupt controller, but someting like the real-time-clock is not available. And also the timers are running from another frequency and there is no bios.



I have managed to load the kernel, do the uncompressing and starting the kernel. At this moment I'm stuck in init/main.c



I'm sure I will manage to go to the code step by step but it's time consuming. So I'm wondering if there is some document available which describes what to change to adopt linux to my hardware.



Regards, Robert



Have you compiled for x386? I.e. not Pentium something...

/RogerL

Roger Larsson Skellefteå Sweden

Thankyou for the response.

I have made it working, linux is booting correctly now. (Yes, it was compiled for 386) Now it complains about not having a root filesystem, which is correct as I didn't supply one. I have to make something in ROM, I have to figure out how to do this.

Robert

You will need to do it in RAM. The Kernel provides a method to create a root file system in RAM (RAMFS) and populate it from a compressed image it finds in the BOOT ROM.

-Michael

BTW. I would take a look at ELinOS. Same might help you to create you "Distribution".

-Michael

Thanks, I will take a look.

Everything is working now, it will mount the root file system from another linux PC using NFS, everything works great. But I will still have to make a system which is working stand alone and gets the filesystem from ROM.

Robert

Robert Pot schrieb:

ELinOs has "ROLO" for this. Maybe it needs to be tweaked to support your architecture.

-Michael

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