Booting new kernel from running kernel

From: Frank Smith (smith@amirix.com)
Date: Fri Sep 15 2000 - 12:46:11 EST


Hi,

I'm trying to figure out a way to immediately boot a
new kernel from within a running system. I do not
care about gracefully shutting down the first kernel..
once I decide to run the new kernel, I'll abandon the
first.

I'm running from a system that consists of a kernel +
initrd, and I'm running completely from the ramdisk.
No disk, no lilo. This is a PowerPC system.

Let's say I fetch a znetboot.initrd from somewhere.
How do I get this new system to boot from my running
system?

Another way to look at this is that I want to use the
first Linux kernel as a boot loader for the second.

Some of the issues I see so far... I need to get the
znetboot.initrd image into contiguous physical memory,
without having previously reserved a sufficiently large
space, so I can force a jump to the proper entry point,
and initiate the normal Linux boot. It's trivial to
get the image into a contiguous virtual space, but how
does one allocate several megabytes of contiguous RAM
in physical space, on the fly in a running system?

Please CC: replies to me as I'm not subscribed to this
list.

Thanks,
Frank.

---
Frank Smith, MCompSci
Principal Software Designer      frank.smith@amirix.com
AMIRIX Systems Inc.              http://www.amirix.com/
Embedded Debian Project          http://www.emdebian.org/
77 Chain Lake Drive              902-450-1700 x289 (Phone)
Halifax, N.S. B3S 1E1            902-450-1704 (FAX)
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