DiskOnChip 2000 and Millenium support in GRUB bootloader

[Ilguiz Latypov]

Hello,

I attached the patch that enables booting off DiskOnChip flash memory
devices.  The patch is the adaptation of the GRUB compatible DiskOnChip 
bootloader from the Linux MTD project.

The Linux MTD project develops open source drivers for various flash
chips.  The project includes the original GRUB compatible bootloader for
DiskOnChip devices.  The bootloader code and the Linux driver are
implemented in different source code modules.  I updated the original
bootloader code with more recent changes in the driver.

Can anybody verify if this patch is valid with respect to the GRUB guide 
lines?  I will appreciate any comments on the patch.  Below are more 
details.

Ilguiz

========================================================================
1. I copied the Millenium-specific operations from the existing MTD driver
   to the GRUB bootloader.  Thanks a lot to David Woodhouse for his 
   original implementation of the GRUB-compatible bootloader and MTD 
   drivers:
     http://linux-mtd.infradead.org/

   The patch can be applied against the 2002-02-19 version of GRUB CVS 
   described at
     http://savannah.gnu.org/cvs/?group_id=68

2. I removed the differences in automatically generated files configure, 
   aclocal.m4 and {,*/}Makefile.in on purpose.  I believe one can 
   re-create the files configure, aclocal.m4 and {,*/}Makefile.in by 
   running the following commands in the top level directory:
     aclocal
     automake
     autoconf

   This patch modifies the "super-configuration" files configure.in and 
   stage1/Makefile.am among the others.

3. I tested the patch with a 64M DiskOnChip 2000.  The GRUB configure 
   command was as follows:
     ./configure --enable-diskonchip --disable-ffs --disable-xfs \
                 --disable-jfs --disable-vstafs --disable-reiserfs \
                 --disable-minix --disable-fat

   This left only ext2 read access in GRUB to load the kernel, as my 
   DiskOnChip was split into ext2 and ext3 partitions.

4. The firmware file will be generated in the GRUB's stage1 directory.  
   The MTD flash programming utility, doc_loadbios, can be used to store 
   the firmware.  Since the MTD DiskOnChip drivers do not rely on BIOS 
   call technique, the GRUB firmware will contain only the code necessary 
   to load the kernel.

5. There is an extra feature not directly related to DiskOnChip introduced 
   with this patch.  There will be more than one attempt to open default 
   configuration file in different partitions of DiskOnChip and of the 
   first hard disk.  This simplified the process of re-formatting of 
   DiskOnChips.  The system will boot off the hard disk when no DiskOnChip 
   partitions are found.

   The above feature gets enabled only with DiskOnChip support.
========================================================================

grub-2002-02-19-doc-noauto.patch
Description: Text document