Etherboot/LinuxBios on Supermicro P4DPE

Atherton, Stephen SAtherton at
Thu Apr 10 03:00:01 CEST 2003

I'm trying to get etherboot and linuxbios running on a supermicro p4dpe.

The config file I'm using is below.  It builds okay, and I get a
romimage of around 460k (not sure why it isn't 524288), but when I burn
it (using flash_and_burn), it doesn't seem to work.  I get no output on
the serial port.  Note that I have BOOT_IDE set to 1 because at this
point I would be happy just to see it boot anything, and I have linux on
the ide hard disk.  Does BOOT_IDE do what I think it does, or is that
for something else?  Is there something wrong with my config file, or
should I use some other flash program for this board?  I tried the one
from supermicro, and doesn't seem to like my romimage file, it exits
with "cannot close filehandle".

Also, a few other questions...

Does linuxbios cause a beep or do anything so that when the machine is
powered on I would have some clue that it is working?

Since I'm using the etherboot elf image as a payload, the linux and
commandline directives in the config file do nothing, right?

What does USE_FALLBACK_IMAGE do exactly?

LinuxBios Config file:

target supermicro
mainboard supermicro/p4dpe
option ROM_SIZE=524288
option ROM_IMAGE_SIZE=49152
option TTYS0_BAUD=9600
option TTYS0_BASE=0x3f8
option TTYS0_LCS=0x3
option USE_ELF_BOOT=1
option BOOT_IDE=1
payload ../eepro100.elf
linux /usr/src/linux-2.4.18-14
commandline root=/dev/hda2 console=ttyS0,9600 single

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