Re: Little-known features of El Torito Spec

David Woodhouse (dan@shearer.org)
Sun, 29 Aug 1999 09:16:43 +0930 (CST)


> dan@shearer.org said:
> > So what does El Torito let us do?
> > 1. You can have multiple boot images
> > 2. You can have no-emulation booting.
>
> You can also have hard drive images, which have no restriction on size.
>
> If you then dig out and fix the int 13h (BIOS disk) driver which back in the
> 1.0.x days used to allow you to use the BIOS routines from Linux, then you
> could just use that hard drive image all the way through the installation.

This sounds in effect the same as no-emulation booting where you get
access via int 13 as well. The only difference is that different int 13
calls are used thus requiring a thin translation layer in the kernel for
no-emulation. I didn't know about the hard drive emulation. Sounds
simpler.

So why do all these Linux distributions insist on doing their CD booting
using steam-driven technology? Think of how neat it could be! Admittedly
it would work on a slightly smaller set of hardware, but it would serve
the majority of x86 users.

Dan

PS Thanks for the Cc. I'm not on linux-kernel at present.

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