Installation guide

Section 1.5:MILO Installations 39
The ARC and AlphaBIOS consoles are designed to load the Windows NT operating
system. Like many other things in the Linux world, they’ve been made to do a job that
they were never intended to do. In this case, they’re used to load Linux. When you
power-on an ARC/AlphaBIOS console machine, you will see the firmware initialize
the hardware, and you will see a boot menu. The initialization process varies greatly
by machine.
The Windows NT ARC/AlphaBIOS firmware is an environment in which programs
can run and make callbacks into the firmware to perform actions.
• The Windows NT osloader is a program that does exactly this.
• The Linux linload.exe is a much simpler program which does just enough
to load and execute MILO. linload.exe loads the appropriate image file into
memory at 0x00000000 and then makes a swap-PAL PALcall to the image file.
The swap is necessary because MILO, like Linux, uses a different PALcode than
Windows NT. MILO relocates itself to 0x200000 and continues on through the
PALcode reset entry point as before.
1.5.1 Setting up ARC for Installation
To perform an ARC/MILO installation, you will need to create two disks:
1. The correct MILO disk for the class of machine onto which you are installing Red
Hat Linux. The MILO disk images are located in the /milo/images directory
on CD 1. See Table 1–1, Alpha System Information for which MILO image you
need.
2. The generic installation kernel disk, made from /images/generic.img on
CD 1.
Please Note
If you are going to perform an NFS, FTP, or hard disk in-
stallation, you will also need a third disk -- the RAM disk
made from /images/ramdisk.img on CD 1.