3 Jul
2012
3 Jul
'12
10:06 a.m.
On 3 July 2012 13:10, David Cantrell <david at cantrell.org.uk> wrote:
You probably need to use their boot-loader, to get the ARM part of the
chip started, although I'm speculating here, I've not bothered to even
look for that documentation, because I don't care. But once the ARM has
started, I presume that everything after that (modulo some X11 drivers)
is bog standard Linux, so could be replaced.
As I understand it, there /is/ not bootloader. The ARM does not boot
the system; the GPU does it, loads the ARM code into RAM and then
kicks it off.
The GPU is smart enough to read a FAT filesystem, look for a specific
file, load it, uncompress it and then tell the ARM core to start
running from a given location.
RISC OS has to "pretend" to be Linux to get loaded - the RISC OS
kernel is compressed in some Linux format and called something like
vmlinuz.gz or the like.
--
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