X1000 CFE Patches: Testers Welcome (Fear not: real-time, no reflashing) v.02 NEW!

The thing which i currently not very well understand , is why there needs for different amigaboot.of and loader.of. I mean, should't it all be just done inside of amigaboot.of ? Becaues for now, it looks like this:

- amigaboot.of = disk reader
- loader.of = linker/loader

amigaboot check for block devices, and load loader.of, which, then, doing another things like claim memory for modules and co and load them from the memory areas to which amigaboot.of load them.

Why ? Why simple not doing that all in amigaboot : read from disk , load to the memory, once all done, we done, os4 boots, why complicate things with all this different binaries ?

@joerg

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I preferred that way. It really should have been handled by Media Toolbox when installing a drive but was easy enough. However that also has other flaws such defaulting on DOS5 or DOS6 when DOS7 is the minimum supported for Workbench.

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Yes, I expressed my gripe about lack of Linux support, which wasn't taken kindly and was met with a retort. It also looks like SLB had access to UBoot support for Ext2 where as amigaboot.of using the OF interface has no support for filesystems so handles it all itself. At least from what I can tell, it scans for block devices, but doesn't try to open any files.

Also, this was even worse in Media Toolbox. No support at all. The user had to manually create a boot volume. I'm sorry, a boot volume, is this Linux? Then copy the bootloader. Then they decided to create the BOOT naming standard, after the fact, which cannot be used for updating boot loader. I don't see the excuse here, check for BOOT: and copy of it exists, otherwise tell the user they need to update by hand.

I also expressed that the boot volume made it complicated. The reply I got was it was easier for the developers. Who cares! The point of OS4 is to be an AmigaOS and be friendly. This goes backwards. Again, it should have been in Media Toolbox, when the drive is installed. Simply create boot volume as part of installing, copy boot loader, done. See, the developers can rely on their easy boot volume, while the user can easily install HDD into system. Every one is happy. Obvious solution to me.

But it looks like nbache has the solution to the boot flag. A variable already exists. So there is a solution.

It also reveals another flaw in the X1000, against it being decent hardware, and that is an inability to manage and save any settings to NVRAM from OS4. It should be in the RTAS resource. But somehow on the X1000 the OS4 developers didn't know the secret to writing to NVRAM or it was too complicated to implement.

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That is a rather odd arrangement of using AmigaOS to load AmigaOS. Which it needs to without any kind of flash ROM. But, it almost goes down the family line, as it's a similar method to the old OS3.9 Kickstart load, patch and reboot.

@kas1e

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So in the Kicklayout documentation, it lists the loader.of as containing Exec. But that's not entirely accurate. To quote:



That's misleading. The exec.library is in fact in the kernel module. The loader.of patches the Kickstart in memory and then would jump start into Exec.

What's also misleading is the Kicklayout mentions a bootloader.txt that doesn't exist.

I think you are right with loader.of being a linker/loader. It also looks like it contains an ELF loader as it would need to load ELF modules in as binaries. Also, if you look you see the loader.of itself isn't an ELF, but is pure binary. IIRC it relocates itself before running.

Possibly they wanted to avoid overloading amigaboot.of with extra code. And it's code that needs loading regardless. Well, loading from disk, then loading to memory. Also, the AmigaOne/XE has a loader. So this method was in place before amigaboot became a thing.

...


In other news did some more USB testing. I checked volume label was unique and changed device name also in case. Still not showing with HDD connected.

Reformatted and copied my fresh Update 2 volume to it. Even with FFS disk cache command and buffers it's still slow. Looked same as before. Drive not showing. Despite loading Kickstart off USB.

Did a test. Rebooted to startup menu a few times after inserting USB into front port. Showed up in menu! But it wasn't booting it. I found the pri was too low and set at 0 so HDD volume was first, which must be first in DOS list. Raised it to 5 so it can boot.

So:
- Appears to ignore os4_bootdevice which it should have set to USB stick.
- Boot pri needed to be 5 (or 10) to compensate like floppy in past.
- Can only locate and mount drive on direct USB port.

I also tried just using my front port. With USB patch. But, even after running patch then inserting stick, amigaboot still couldn't see stick. So I need to pull it out of one port and insert in another. Strange. Amigaboot can see it in my keyboard hub. AmigaDOS can only see it in a direct port.

@Hypex
Quote:Yes, SLB_v2 calls U-Boot functions for the ext2fs support.
There were 2 main reasons for the "SLB" boot method used on the AmigaOne SE/XE/etc.:
- Too small EEPROM for PPCBoot/U-Boot + additional AmigaOS file system loading and AmigaOS booting implementations, etc., even much worse on the µA1 with it's onboard R7000 GPU without a ROM, the BIOS for it is included in the U-Boot image instead (AFAIK compressed, but I don't know if gzip, bzip2 or something else, and maybe even other U-Boot parts had to be compressed on the µA1 as well to include everything required in the small EEPROM).
- Licence reasons. U-Boot is GPL and therefore closed source code, like the implementations for all AmigaOS file systems and ISO9660, couldn't be included in U-Boot itself but had to be moved into a separate binary (SLB/SLB_v2).

Adding an ext2fs implementation in AmigaBoot, if it can't use firmware functions for it like SLB_v2 does, may be problematic since no GPL code, for example nothing from the Linux nor GRUB ext2fs sources, can be used in AmigaBoot.
OTOH there may be other, free and usable for AmigaBoot implementations of ext2fs instead, for example in Net/Free/Open/DragonFly BSD.