Booting VSTa

Hi all,

I've been doing some more thinking about how to improve the booting of VSTa.
Currently I can use DOS or my floppy based loader. I'd like to see what
the general response to some more developments are.

First a couple of comments: The DOS load is neat as it allows all of the
boot time server's parameters to be specified in "boot.lst", and the
location of the servers can physically change on the disk (although not the
name/directory unless boot.lst is changed). My current loader requires a
build process where the boot time servers are merged into a large file and
then placed at a known location before it can be booted.

I'd like to extend the boot loading to handle hard drives, and provide some
of the features found on boot loaders like LILO under Linux. In particular
I want to still be able to boot DOS and OS/2 as well as VSTa (Linux would be
nice as well!). The biggest problem is that in order to be able to build
the boot loader I need to write in assembly language (or at least this is by
far the neatest way to go), and I'm currently trying to keep the code/data
at < 32 kbytes.

The problems with writing the code are:

1. If I don't build any filesystem knowledge into the boot loader, I need
to maintain a list of all of the sectors that need to be loaded to boot a
kernel/boot servers.

2. If I build simple support for a filesystem into the boot loader it would
need to be for a simple fs, and I have a natural aversion to DOS fs because
of the filename length and permissions restrictions. This solution would
avoid needing to pre-build a file with the kernel/boot servers in it, as
boot.lst could be scanned and read at boot time.

So, what does everyone think - go with the first solution (where I need to
find a way of determining which sectors are in a pre-built boot file), or go
with the second solution (where we need a special boot partition)?

I can see arguments for and against both, so before I start to think about
any more code here I'd like some comments. Maybe I've missed another way?

Regards,

Dave
Received on Sat Jan 8 05:52:00 1994