Re: new SMP kernel on the old Netra X1

On Friday 2025-09-05 08:09, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:

>Please keep in mind that SILO works with blocklists meaning that you
>can't place the kernel in arbitrary locations and reference them as
>files.

Not how I remember it.

x86 LILO kept blocklists of the kernel file, so you had to rerun
it all the time. 

SILO on the other hand kept a blocklist on some drivers
(/boot/*.b), and rerunning silo was only needed when a new
silo.deb was installed, not when placing kernels.


In any case, the boot process seems exceptionally similar between x86
and SPARC OBP; x86 firmware loads sector 0 and OBP loads sector 1
(because someone decided to put a disk label at sector 0 instead).
Once your 512-byte program runs, you have free reign to load
whatever other code in whatever complex ways you can think of.