Re: booting the Gdium

On Sat, Oct 15, 2011 at 01:51:19AM +0200, bao.mengqian <at> gmail.com wrote:
> Dear list, I am trying to run NetBSD on my Gdium and cannot seem to get
> the booting process right. I have succesfully booted OpenBSD on this
> machine before so I am aware of the eccentricities of the PMON
> bootloader. The OpenBSD devs solved this problem by passing the OpenBSD
> loader as the kernel and the real OpenBSD kernel as the initrd to PMON.
> In the case of NetBSD however, I was unable to find a bootloader binary
> for the evbmips/GDIUM platform.

I've a plan to port the OpenBSD boot loader to NetBSD, but this is
not done yet (for several reasons I've been distracted from loongson
developements, but I still intend to work on this).

> 
> Logs tell me that Manuel Bouyer and Macallan are lead developers of this
> port. And since Macallan announced in a blog post he was now able to
> run NetBSD in multiuser mode on the Gdium, I am hoping he would share
> his method of actually booting this machine.
> 
> Up till now I have been succesful in running the NetBSD kernel only, by
> directly passing it to PMON as the kernel file. Of course, when the
> kernel finishes loading, it cannot find its rootfs as I did not specify
> any (can this be passed with a 'root=' parameter, like Linux uses?).

No (in fact, if it doesn't find its root device, it's probably because
it can't get anything from the pmon variables. It does find its root
device on the fuulong). But you can build a kernel where the root device is
hardcoded: in the config file, change:
config          netbsd  root on ? type ?
to match your root device, e.g.