# 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