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KexecKexecPosted Nov 14, 2002 9:41 UTC (Thu) by ctg (subscriber, #3459)Parent article: Kexec Another important usage of Kexec is in conjunction with "LinuxBIOS". LinuxBIOS is perhaps slightly misnamed as it provides a very small, simple 32 bit initialisation function that does enough hardware set up to enable a "payload" to be loaded from flash memory and executed. This payload is the bootloader proper - for example, etherboot, or a modified etherboot that can acccess hard disk drives as well as network drives. Another payload would be a fairly minimal linux kernel. This kernel would be minimal to enable it to fit in the relatively small flash device found on most motherboards. The minimal kernel would load and initialise the hardware. It would then use kexec to load a more full featured kernel from hard disk, network device or where ever. The minimal firmware kernel would be fairly stable - i.e. you don't want to be reflashing all the time - but you might well want to change your kernel quite often (especially if doing some kernel development). LinuxBIOS provides a whole host of advantages over the traditional 16 bit BIOSes - including, but not limited, allowing very large clusters of commodity PC hardware to be managed more effectively (i.e. you don't need 12,000 screens and keyboards, you can do "gang" updates/reconfigures etc).
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