[gNewSense-users] gNewSenseToMIPS: PMON2000 version and updates

[s . boutayeb]

Hi,

For our porting project of the gNewSense distribution on the Yeelong laptop, we
try to figure out some details about the pmon2000 boot firmware.

First of all, we want to be sure that we can restore and reinstall the system
from an external media (such as an usb key or an external disk) before we make
the yeelong unusable because of our experiments.

We have experimented initially the procedure on a Fuloong mini, and instaled on
it the latest loongson2 release
(http://bjlx.org.cn/loongson/loongson2_debian5_20081216.tar.bz2). We want to
adapt later the procedure on the Yeelong if possible (we have no access to this
hardware yet, but we want to prepare the future work already).

The /boot/boot.cfg file has a section "title usb" with which we should boot from
an usb media. We installed on an usb key the file
http://bjlx.org.cn/loongson2f/usb_loongson2f_v4.tar.bz2. Unfortunately, the
systems hangs with a kernel panic, after selecting the "usb" option from the
boot.cfg file. The pmon2000 version is 2.1 (Bonito).

So, my question: could we boot from an usb device with PMON2000
Bonito 2.1. My guess is that there is a bug in that version and my hope is that
it has been possibly fixed in a newer PM2000 version.

Thank you for your help

Best regards

Samy