PIBS: Initial setup of PIBS boot loader

We use an IBM (or now AMCC) 440GX Ocotea Eval Board. The environment we have is multiple 440GX boards connect to a host machine via a switch that acts as a private LAN. The eval boards never touch the network. The host machine has to have 2 Ethernet Cards (we used a USB adapter version to get a second NIC). The first connects to the network (on the domain), while the second connects the host machine to the private LAN switch. Thus, you can have users Remote Desktop into the Host machine to work on the boards, without ever having to physically be in the lab. If you have a remote reset capability enabled, they can do everything remotely, and putting the boards together like this allows for sharing of resources--meaning cost savings since you will not need a one-to-one of boards to developers.



There is some setup that needs to be done first. To get the boards to work right. We are assuming you have the connections as shown above and that you have a kernel sitting on the host machine (with TFTP enabled) so that the boards can boot from the host machine.



Setup the configuration for the first ethernet port eth0. Here in this example, the board is assigned static IP address 192.168.0.13. Change this to whichever IP you want for your network.

PIBS $ set ifconfigcmd0=ent0 192.168.0.13 netmask 255.255.255.0 up

Assign the location of the kernel on the host machine so that it can be grabbed through the TFTP server.

PIBS $ set bootfilename=C:\tftpboot_gx\integrityappmono3.bin

Set the address of the host machine where the TFTP server is located and the kernel is saved.

PIBS $ set ipdstaddr0=192.168.0.1

Tell the board to use ethernet to get the kernel to boot from on reset/power on.

PIBS $ set autoboot=eth

Sometimes it takes about 3 - 5 seconds to run the ifconfigcmd to bring up the eth0 device. Set the delay to 5 or more seconds; feel this part out since some boards take longer than others for some reason. It seems that the newer AMCC Ocotea boards are slower to bring up the eth0 than the older IBM Ocotea boards. 7 seconds is recommended.

PIBS $ set autobootdelay=7