Re: Bootable CD and grub (was: Hurd Advocacy?)

[Marco Gerards]

Greg Buchholz <sleepingsquirrel@sleepingsquirrel.org> writes:

>       Here's an update on my status in getting a bootable hurd CD.
> Using a patched grub and a script called mkbimage, I was able to create a
> bootable el-torito ext2fs HD image with a copy of most of my hurd
> partition on it.  Gnumach seems to boot fine, but the process halts on a
> line that says...

Great! Thanks for doing this!!
 
> ext2fs: device: hd0s1: panic: get_hypermetadata: had magic number 0x11d
> (should be 0xef53)

The problem is that it is an emulated disk. GRUB uses the BIOS to
access the disk, but GNUMach doesn't. I think you can solve this by
using a small filesystem to boot GRUB from and load the modules and
kernel from.

You need a isof9660fs.static (you need to make this yourself). I think
you can make it writable with the copy story, which you should compile
into the iso9660fs.static.

I think no-one ever tried to boot GNU/Hurd from CDROM or made a
iso9660fs.static...

 
> ...I'll try to track down the meaning of that message.  My next thought is
> to try to create a libtrivfs ram-file (as opposed to a full ram-fs, the
> learn to crawl before you walk thing) and setup of some of those as active
> translators to enable write access.  Then I'll take a look at getting
> tempfs and unionfs up and running over top of the CD image.

tmpfs doesn't work because of a kernel (or default pager) bug. Unionfs
isn't finished yet (do you want to work on it? :)).

Thanks,
Marco