Novaboot

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.

Instalation

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

Documentation

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.

Client side

• novaboot documentation

Server-side (optional, needed only by server administrators for setup C)

• novaboot-shell
• adduser-novaboot

Hardware guides

• Raspberry Pi (work-in-progress)