kexec-loader v1.4.1 has been released, this new version includes some improvements to the "shell" and support for loading multiboot modules. I also added firewire support to the disk image.

kexec-loader v1.4 released!

New features in this release include a basic shell and some bugfixes.

Nightly builds of kexec-loader can be found here, for those who want to try some of the more experimental features without building a disk image.

Released kexec-loader v1.3.1, this is pretty much just v1.3 with a couple of important bugfixes.

kexec-loader v1.3 is now released, the biggest change in this release is support for reading GRUB menu.lst and device.map files to allow directly using this in place of GRUB on systems which have autogenerated GRUB configurations.

kexec-loader v1.2 has been released, it has many changes, including a new build system allowing for smaller and easier to create initramfs's, it also has a full README written by Philip Kent (lsproc).

I am considering making an online tool for generating disk images similar to http://www.rom-o-matic.net/. Any comments, thoughts or ideas on this would be greatly appreciated.

kexec-loader v1.1 released! :D

This release has a lot of improvements over v1.0 including automatic filesystem detection and a lot of code has been rewritten to be more robust, read the ChangeLog file for a full list.

To reboot Linux you use a syscall named reboot, the reboot(2) manpage shows that the libc reboot() function should have the same arguments as the syscall:

int reboot(int magic, int magic2, int flag, void *arg);

However, the uClibc developers decided to be clever, they instead made a reboot() function that takes a single argument (flag), of course they don't include a declaration in the headers, then you would KNOW they don't use the normal arguments. After several hours of debugging and finding that flag was 4276215469 (magic1) in sys_reboot() I eventually downloaded the uClibc source, lo and behold!

int reboot(int flag)
{
	return (_reboot((int) 0xfee1dead, 672274793, flag));
}

This has been very productive.

This howto explains setting up 2 or more monitors under X11 using the xinerama extention which is supported under XFree86 and X.org, it is only tested under Linux but I assume it works under BSD and other unixes as well.