Adam Agnew <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > That's the idea. Eric is pushing for a scheme where by we would chain-load > > > to the first sector of a partition. I agree that's a good idea. But we'd > > > need to put another bootloader with polled ide and no BIOS dependance > > > > How do you place such a bootloader ? As an addition to the BIOS or as an > > replacement, so that the kernel can do the complete initialisation ? > > ?... I think there's a misunderstanding. In such a scheme, there would be > a VERY minimal bootloader on the flash with linuxbios. It would then load > a LARGER bootloader which lives on your hard drive, just like LILO does.
My thinking is the minimal bootloader would find the an ELF header in the first couple sectors of the drive. The ELF header would specify where to find the rest of the image. For supporting arbitrary locations above 4GB we'd need to support 64 bit ELF on i386, but that is straightforward. And as easy to setup as lilo. So for minimal systems that should be all we'd need. And then for systems where you want an interactive all singing all dancing bootloader. We can load the linux kernel + an initrd with kexec support that supports every filesystem, and every device we care about as a second stage bootloader. I think there is a lot the original x86 BIOS got right, it was simple and it did simple minimal things. The only thing I object to is the need to support BIOS calls. On the PC platform enough programmers didn't use the BIOS calls for them to provice hardware independance. And we saw cost decreases because software directly accessed the hardware and people had to be compatible. I like simple and stupid bioses because there are fewer opportunities for bugs. Eric
