Booting on PReP Systems

From openSUSE

Boot from the CD

CD1 is bootable. Set the boot device to your CD drive. On MTX boards with PPCBug firmware, type pboot 0 60 to load from controller 0, SCSI ID 6, LUN 0 (or whatever your CD is).

Boot over the Network

Copy the file zImage.prep.initrd from CD1/boot/ to your /tftpboot directory. On MTX boards with PPCBug firmware, type nbo to boot via network.

Do not forget to add console=ttyS0 to the kernel command line options or you will not see anything on the serial console.

Boot Loader Configuration in the Installed System

PReP boards can only boot one fixed kernel image. There is no real boot loader because the firmware has no callbacks to load things from a drive. zImage.prep contains a small user interface to edit kernel command line options. lilo will create one for you (including command line) and it will write it to the specified disk. An example config:

# kernel to boot when no user input was given
default=linux
# large enough 0x41 PReP boot partition
boot=/dev/sda1

# kernel ELF binary
image=/boot/vmlinux
       label=linux
       initrd=/boot/initrd
       # kernel cmdline options
       # resume= for suspend-to-disk
       # quiet to surpress the useless kernel messages
       # sysrq= to allow backtrace when things go downhill
       append="root=/dev/sda3 console=ttyS0 quiet sysrq=1"

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