Gray Carper Director of Technology xRhino, Inc.

gcarper@xrhino.com

1.0 May 29th, 2002 gc Initial version. 1.1 June 3rd, 2002 ms Converted entire document to docbook format and added a section on the p2lboot.opt file. 1.2 June 14th, 2002 gc p2lboot.opt (the display and prevent sections) and p2lboot.cnf (the initrd_image and sbios_version sections) information has been updated. This HOW-TO describes the different bootloader configuration options available to Sony Playstation 2 Linux users. This document is intended to provide information on configuration and now the bootloading process, which remains a proprietary and closed process. 2002 Manu Sporny, Gray Carper, Jonathan Turner Gray Carper gcarper@xrhino.com Manu Sporny msporny@xrhino.com Jonathan Turner jturner@xrhino.com Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with the Invariant Sections being Copyright, with no Front-Cover Texts and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the GNU Free Documentation License is available on the World Wide Web at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html. You can also obtain it by writing to the

Free Software Foundation, Inc. 59 Temple Place - Suite 330 Boston MA 02111-1307 USA

A typical p2lboot.cnf file may look something like this: "Linux" vmlinux "" 203 /dev/hda1 "crtmode=ntsc3,60" PS2 Linux "Linux - initrd" vmlinux initrdgz.img 203 /dev/hda1 "crtmode=ntsc3,60" PS2 Linux with bootstrapping initrd "Linux - single user" vmlinux "" 203 /dev/hda1 "crtmode=ntsc3,60 single" PS2 Linux in single user mode "Linux - emergency" vmlinux "" 203 /dev/hda1 "crtmode=ntsc3,60 emergency" PS2 Linux in recovery mode The entries (which are limited to 52 within a single p2lboot.cnf file), have a very specific format: menu_display_name kernel_image initrd_image sbios_version root_device kernel_command_line boot_description menu_display_name Specifies the text to use as a menu item in the bootable configurations list. This should be less than 12 characters in length and may contain spaces. kernel_image The name of the file on the memory card that is the bootable kernel image. initrd_image If you are using an initial ramdisk, the name of the ramdisk image should be specified. As of the 2.2.x series kernels, once the initial ramdisk image is loaded into memory, it is never freed. Therefore, if you have a compressed image of 5MB and it uncompresses to 10MB, you will only have 18MB available to you in Linux (32MB - 10MB - 5MB = 18MB). sbios_version It appears that this is the SBIOS version to use for Linux kernel IOP interaction. More testing must be done for verification, though. The typical value is "203". root_device The device node that specifies the root filesystem. This works much like most Linux distributions and is passed in as a kernel command line option. kernel_command_line If you want to pass kernel options to configure the kernel during boot, you can place them here. Options are in the key=value pair form common to the Linux kernel. boot_description A more verbose bootable configuration description than the menu_display_name allows can be placed as the last section of each line. A typical p2lboot.opt file may look something like this: timeout= display=ntsc prevent=Linux%mc0:/BWLINUX/vmlinux% timeout The timeout value gives the number of seconds to wait before booting the option that is described by the prevent field. display The display signal format. This is used to initialize the bootloader screen and, via the crtmode kernel parameter, the Linux console. Possible values are vga, ntsc, and pal. prevent The default boot option. The first part of the '%' separated value is the menu_display_name in the p2lboot.cnf file followed by the absolute path to the kernel_image. There are usually two other files that are kept on the memory card along with the bootloader configuration files; icon.sys and penguin.ico The format and purpose of both files are covered by Sony Non-Disclosure and thus cannot be discussed.