An official explanation written by Paul Bame is available too!
This page sums up the most important steps leading to a bootable hard disk with the STI-console.
Please bear in mind that most data here is pretty old (read: "out of date") and is kept for historical/archive puposes.
It is understood that $TOP is your directory in which you have your copy of the PA/Linux CVS kernel.
Step One:
You should have a SCSI hard disk drive to plug into your Linux i386 box. If you like the hotplug thingy, try:
echo "scsi add-single-device 0 0 X 0" > /proc/scsi/scsi
The X is the SCSI ID of your HDD. If you experience troubles, look at the SCSI-Programming HOW-TO!
Now, you have to partition the HDD. We will try to have this type of format:
Step Two:
With your mounted disk, you have to copy a file system into your third partition. Then, you make a vmlinux with the package STI-console in the Console Drivers section:
cd $TOP/linux
make menuconfig
This makes you choose the STI-console and deselect Support for the console on serial port in the Character Devices.
make vmlinux
Once done, you copy your vmlinux in /dev/sda3 mounted in /mnt/hdscsi, for our example
cp vmlinux /mnt/hdscsi
Step Three:
Here comes the part for the loader. First, go into your $TOP/palo, modify your Makefile and comment the lines starting with RAMDISK and NFSROOT. Then:
make clean
make
make iplboot
umount /mnt/hdscsi
./palo/palo -b iplboot -c "3/vmlinux HOME=/ TERM=LINUX console=tty root=/dev/sda3" -k ../linux/vmlinux -I /dev/sda
Here you are, the cook is ready. If you prefer already-made food, here are the binaries for palo, iplboot and vmlinux working on our 712.
If you like scripts, here is our shell script where you have to pass the $TOP and $HD parameters and it does the copy.
Here is our root file system archive.
It can compile linux_logo for example and it looks nice. You also have very good network support (e.g. ftp, telnet...).
