[Soekris] Changing net4801 BIOS settings from Linux (boot order)

[Jasper Wallace]

On Fri, 4 Aug 2006, Trevor Talbot wrote:

> On Thursday, Aug 3, 2006, at 23:50 US/Pacific, Andrej Ota wrote:
>
>>>> Is there a way of changing boot order of devices from within Linux
>>>> (kernel 2.6.18)?
>>> Not really a way supported by Soekris; however, you should be able to
>>> use the 'nvram' kernel driver, read the NVRAM data, and write out the
>>> changes (or maybe just the whole thing; I'm not sure which is the >> best
>>
>> ...
>>
>>> It would appear that the drive order is specified starting at byte
>>> 0x0013, based on what I see there; you'd have to check your own unit
>>> and see if the offset is the same or not. You should be able to find
>>> it fairly easily if you know the boot order you set in the boot
>>> monitor.
>>
>> I've seen this on my net4801 as well, but these bytes remain constant,
>> regardless of the comBIOS setting. I can change them, but they don't
>> affect the boot sequence (at least not in version 1.28).
>
> Some old notes I have suggest it's stored at 0x21 to 0x24.

Looks good - here's a dump of the 1st 128 bytes of a Net4521's cmos:

0000 : 52 00 16 00 22 00 01 06 08 06 26 02 50 80 00 00 : R . " ....&.P. 
0010 : 00 49 f0 00 01 80 02 00 fc 0f 2f 00 00 00 00 00 :  I. ... ../ 
0020 : 00 80 81 f0 ff 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 0c 05 f2 :  ....        ...
0030 : 00 fc 20 42 f0 04 00 00 00 00 00 00 1c 00 00 00 :  . B..      . 
0040 : 02 10 01 08 10 00 00 00 02 00 00 01 00 00 00 00 : .....   .  . 
0050 : 00 00 08 00 00 20 02 01 00 00 00 00 01 00 00 20 :   .   ..    . 
0060 : 02 00 00 00 01 00 00 20 21 00 02 00 05 20 08 00 : .   .   ! . . . 
0070 : 08 00 00 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 48 00 00 02 01 00 : .     .   H  ..


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