Novaboot is a tool that automates booting of operating systems on target hardware (typically embedded boards) or in Qemu. Initially, it was developed to boot NOVA Microhypervisor (hence the name), but nowadays is well suited for booting Linux (and perhaps other OSes) too.
The simplest way to install novaboot is to install perl and its
packages IO-Stty and Expect and copy the
novaboot script somewhere to your $PATH.
You can also install everything (including man pages) by:
make install
To install the optional server part (see below), run:
make -C server install
Novaboot can be used in variety of setups. Most typical ones are depicted in the figure below.
The setups are fully described in the documentation, but in short: Setup A is for power users, who can configure everything themselves, whereas setup C is useful for students, who just want to access the target device with as little configuration on their side as possible.
- novaboot documentation
- Raspberry Pi (work-in-progress)