ollie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Eric W. Biederman wrote:
>
> >>Actually, the IDE capable etherboot is about 50KB, and it can read disk,
> >>ethernet, FAT,
> >>ext2, ELF, (a.out ??) Much more cool ??
> >>
> >
> >I believe the IDE capable etherboot was rather hardwired to ext2. But
> >I belive by removing filesystem support I can get it even smaller. This is
> >still on my todo though.
> >
> No, it just adopt the fsys_*.c from grub. By carefully puting more filesystem
> code
> from Grug into the Ethernet, every filesystems supported by Grub can be
> supported
>
> etherboot. So I said, FAT support with 50KB (it is been done here).
O.k. nice to know. We should probably share around these patches
more so they can get in the core etherboot. Ken Yap is fairly responsive
to accepting good code. Occasionally he releases a little slowly but
otherwise all is good.
What I am envisioning, and have implemented in proof of concept form is
to add IDE and floppy support to etherboot in the following way.
1) No filesystem code.
2) DHCP controllable with filename "/dev/hda" or filename "/dev/fd0"
3) Scan for an ELF header through the first 4KB of disk (as elfboot.c does).
- This allows us to still use the pc partition tables.
- This allows us to do the lilo like trick of loading images
in filesystems by memorizing their locations on disk.
We would memory the location of an ELF bootable by writing a ELF header
the 63 unused sectors normally found on a disk right after the partition
table.
- Equally we can just have a ELF bootable image at the start of the disk.
This all works with the IDE code as I integrated it into LinuxBIOS already.
There is real value in building a GRUB like loader but I currently do not
see the need to understand filesystems currently. If I am going to bloat
I will probably use the Linux kernel. I can put it on as a bootloader
on my disk and switch between loaded images.
Anyway bootloaders are next.
Eric
