| From: Reindl Harald <h.rei...@thelounge.net> | understaning the boot process of my systems is something self-evindent for me | from the day i bought my first PC - likely the reason why i never needed to | reinstall any OS be it windows or linux from scratch
That would suggest that you are insane :-) (I mean that as a kind of compliment.) The MBR boot process has layers of cruft. It grew over many generations of hardware. Things are there for historical reasons that most people should not waste their time learning. Here are just a few aspects that come to mind: - all the different limitations of disk size. Generations of them! - actual disk geometry (CCHHR etc.). So much fallout from this! - 512 byte disk sectors vs 4K byte sectors - fitting boot code in the interstices of a filesystem layout - the 8086 instruction set - the A20 gate - emulating legacy (PS/2) mouse / keyboard with USB (done with ROM code run in SMM) - SMM in general - MTRRs - ACPI - NETBIOS, BOOTP, PXE - first, second, and third level boot loaders - LILO, grub, grub2, syslinux, ... - MBR, an amazing 512 bytes of first level boot loader (8086 code) and primary partition table. - BIOS system calls Much of this information is hard to find. Especially in an easy to digest form. Over the years, I've had to know, or thought I had to know, each of these things. I've forgotten the details of many. _______________________________________________ rpmfusion-users mailing list -- rpmfusion-users@lists.rpmfusion.org To unsubscribe send an email to rpmfusion-users-le...@lists.rpmfusion.org
