# README.mipselboot Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com> 2004/07/19 The mips/DEC boot support allows you to create a bootable CD which will work with little-endian mips DEC machines (e.g. older DECstations), for example bootable installation media. The method used for this is the same as in delo, the Linux-on-mipsel bootloader. See the delo README for more information about how to configure the DECstation's firmware to find and boot the CDROM. The DEC firmware reads the first 512-byte "sector" off a disk and parses information from that sector. The information in question is the location (start sector) and length of the first stage boot loader. (On Linux, this boot loader is in ELF format and the firmware does not know how to deal with ELF directly, we have to parse the ELF headers and find the raw binary data needed inside it. Pointers to the start and length of that raw binary are what is stored in the boot sector.) The firmware will load and execute the first stage boot loader, and from that point the system should be able to find the normal OS kernel and start up fully. To use the DEC boot support code in genisoimage, simply specify the kernel file location (relative to the CD root) as follows: genisoimage ... -mipsel-boot <kernel file> -o mipsel.iso mipsel-files