Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 09 Aug 1999 02:50:54 -0700 | From | "H. Peter Anvin" <> | Subject | Re: Kernels > 1M |
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Dominik Kubla wrote: > > On Mon, Aug 09, 1999 at 10:36:00AM +0200, Werner Almesberger wrote: > > > Considering that nothing but bootsect.S itself uses syssize, the most > > straightforward solution to the problem seems to be to change the unit > > of syssize from paragraphs to sectors, to increase the header version > > number in setup.S (not 100% clean, but the best approximation to a > > version number for bootsect.S we have), and to update the checks > > accordingly. > > > > Hi Werner et al., > > how about dropping the boot and setup code from the kernel entirely? > Just move the whole stuff to the bootloader (as it used to be done > with commercial Unices on PC's) and have it setup the whole 32Bit PM > environment, load the (possibly zipped) vmlinux binary (not necessarily in > this order), pass the config options on the command line (or through some > reserved memory) and execute it. > > Thus we would no longer need as86/ld86 to build the kernel (see the thread > about this topic) and building the kernel would be the same as on > SPARC/MIPS/ALPHA...
bootsect.S could definitely be dropped, but I personally suspect it would be a mistake to drop the setup. Otherwise the dependencies between boot loader and kernel would be a lot more painful.
> The next step then would be to merge MILO(Alpha), MILO(Mips), LILO and SILO > (Werner. we talked about that over dinner back at Linux-Kongress in > Würzburg, remember?) into a common bootloader for all architectures. That > should make life a bit easier for the distributors and documentation > authors ... > > Are there any _REAL_ problems that would prevent this?
Well, except for the fact that booting is so incredibly different on different architectures...
It would probably be quite a bit easier with the "lbcon" boot loader I'm currently working on, if only because it runs in a 32-bit environment and most of it is C code, compiled with gcc. That doesn't mean that there needs to be code that is substantially different between the various architectures.
The main reason I'm writing lbcon is because I think it will make doing fancy stuff with initrd a lot less painful, and it should be easy to put a nice user interface on it. That's the theory, at least...
-hpa
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