Fun in the lab this week, we got an Intel Mac Mini last Friday, and today Chuck got L4 up and booting on the Mac Mini.
This is a bit different to just getting a standard
OS up and running. For a start we a booting new development
kernels all the time, so its nice to be able to transfer an image
across without having to move media around. Also you do a lot of
printf debugging so having a decent terminal is
important. Usually for developing L4 we boot over the network and
use the serial console for terminal debugging. Unfortunately the
Mac Mini doesn't have a serial port, and getting a toolchain to compile
EFI modules that enable network booting was somewhat problematic.
Enter Firewire. This lets us just use one cable to connect to the workstation which we can use for downloading and serial deubgging. Awesome! So Chuck boots ELILO from EFI, which then loads a simple Firewire driver. From the desktop side, a simple app is used to copy the image across and act as a console. Rock on!
With any luck we will have a working Darbat up and running on the Mac Mini by the end of next week.