30/12/2011

MOSLO, a short story of how is it cooked

Well, MOSLO has been OUT for some time now, and I was thinking it might be time for me to explain more about it!

First, for those not knowing it yet, it is available here: http://wiki.meego.com/ARM/N950. The MOSLO was done to support multiple OS loading on the N9/N950 devices from Nokia.

The basic "architecture" or flow is this:
  1. Bootloader launches the kernel
  2. The kernel boots from rootfs
  3. Rootfs contains the scripts to either:
    1. export USB to the Host PC so that the developer can put another kernel (in the boot/bzImage) and rootfs or
    2. load the boot/bzImage from the "exported USB" image if there is such kernel
Another thing about MOSLO is how to install it. Here we need to understand a bit about the role of the Harmattan flashing architecture. The design is to load into the device the right software that will do the work of flashing MOSLO. For that, we can use any Harmattan image (or "fiasco.bin") that is released with the One Click Flasher (or OCF).

Once we have the right image loaded, we can send the MOSLO to be flashed. As such, MOSLO comes packaged for N950 or N9.