Re: VSTa boot

>I got VSTa up and running on its own 10Mb DOS partition; I really don't like
>it this way, booting into dos in order to get VSTa. Also, I can't boot
>directly from its own fs.
>
>I saw somewhere in the digest files someone is working on an ext2fs (linux)
>server, and on booting code which doesn't need dos. I wonder what is the
>status of these.
>
>Booting up seems quite simple, assuming vstafs leaves the first sector
>available as a boot sector. Current boot.exe jobs should be divided: one
>tool for parsing boot.lst, checking what files are to be loaded, and
>creating list of physical disk blocks for each file. This list is patched
>on top of a boot sector loader, which simply reads blocks of data using BIOS
>services. It is also possible to save pointers to physical pos of each file,
>and have the files stored in 1 block, but this might be incompatible with
>some filesystems.
>
>If nobody else is on to this, I'll start with it.

If you'd be willing to take a little extra time to examine a few other
issues as well before starting in on a new boot mechanism, you could
make life much more enjoyable for a lot of other people as well. :-)
VSTa isn't the only free OS that has serious bootstrap troubles.
The Linux boot loaders have a stupid 512K limit on boot image size,
which is OK if you're loading _just_ a relatively small kernel and
a few device drivers, but sometimes would be nice to load a lot more
from the start - for example, a whole suite of device drivers, plus
an entire root disk image that you can work from in the absence of
a functional hard disk. The BSD and Mach boot loaders don't have
this 512K limitation, but are otherwise very brain-dead and rely on
interpreting the file system at boot time, which means they are
very file system specific. None of the BSD, Linux, or Mach boot loaders
have any notion of loading multiple boot modules at once during bootstrap
like VSTa does; yet both Linux and Mach are now seriously starting to need
this feature.

It sounds like what you're planning to do at this point is essentially
rewrite LILO to support multiple boot modules and to run under VSTa.
With a little planning, I think you could fairly easily create a boot loader
that supports VSTa, Linux, Mach, and BSD at the same time in basically the
same way, and could easily become "the definitive free OS boot loader". :-)
There's also a lot of already-written free boot loader code I could point
you to that might make your job easier.

So, are you interested?

                                Bryan
Received on Sat Nov 5 08:50:19 1994