On Tue, 29 Feb 2000, Tigran Aivazian wrote:
> Hi guys,
[...]
> I am interested in anything ranging from some hacks to raise the limit a
> bit to fully-featured protected mode ELF kernel image loaders, if anyone
Ooh! So glad you asked!
I'm looking at having a full pm, elf32 bootloader for ia32, someday
somehow :) Maybe this summer...
Current quick outline looks a bit like this:
new simple bootloader for ia32 [Sat Feb 12 21:31:27 2000]
---------------------------------------------------------
What we want:
o no limits (or reasonable limits) on kernel size
As of late, kernel size has been increasing.. fast approaching the
508k limit imposed by the current bootloader (the source of that
limit being? Is it because we use the BIOS PM 'move' routine? Or
just the luck of the addresses? Is it even still there?)
o bootloader (PM, 32bit)
No more of this 16 bit crap except where it needs to happen: in
the bootsector. Is it worth it? To convert current bunch of 16 bit
code to 32 bit could mean a ton of new segreg prefixes all over
the place. Then again, bootcode is a goner once the kernel is
loaded, all those extra bytes don't really matter. More C, less asm.
o boot kernel binary is standard elf32
ELF kernel loading pretty standard fare on the BSD's. (Solaris
too?). Also makes for consistency especially on ia32 (no more
need to support zImage/bzImage). Plays nice with other bootloaders
which can boot elf kernels.
I'd love to have someone with a lot more experience with such things in on
it with me, if it seems to be a reasonable goal. It seems like it'd be a
good, fun way to get down and dirty. :) What are some other folks looking
at re: features to add, misfeatures of the current bootloader to avoid,
etc?
Chris Noe
(stiker@northlink.com)
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