Re: booting up (simple)

[bwitt@arch.sel.sony.com (Brian Witt) writes:]

>(1) Do you really have to copy things down to location 0? For
> students using 16M RAM machines, they won't miss the lower 1M.

If you don't, it's harder to code in DOS. Remember that only the bottom meg
is directly accessible in real mode.

>(2) Are there conventions for kernel segments. Otherwise I'll follow
> the FreeBSD processor-depend stuff.

Not that I know of.

>(3) Next week I build my target '486 machine. I believe boot loaders
> and LILO are much work to interface with. Is this justified?

You should look at GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader). It's the reason I
stopped using my own boot loader. See:

    http://www.uruk.org/~erich/grub/

It knows how to load in highmem (VSTa, in fact, now loads at 1M), and
handles machines with more memory than can be described by the old config
mem technique. It also knows how to load multiple programs, which is how
VSTa boots with all of its servers. Quite a nice little program, and no,
not very hard at all to interface into. Coding up my own boot loader was
MUCH more work than adapting VSTa to GRUB. I would've used it to begin
with, but it didn't exist when VSTa was first coded.

                                                Regards,
                                                Andy Valencia
Received on Mon May 3 09:07:00 1999