[coreboot] Convert Assembly JMP to C

[Joseph Smith]

On Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:24:32 -0400, "Corey Osgood" <corey.osgood at gmail.com>
wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 12, 2008 at 12:19 AM, Joseph Smith <joe at settoplinux.org>
wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:13:18 -0400, "Corey Osgood"
> <corey.osgood at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>> On Thu, Sep 11, 2008 at 10:31 PM, Peter Stuge <peter at stuge.se> wrote:
>>>> Joseph Smith wrote:
>>>>> So for Linux do you mean reading /etc/fstab to find the /boot label
>>>>> and going from there???
>>>>
>>>> No, that is a much later problem.
>>>>
>>>> We are at the stage when all we know are physical hard drives, and we
>>>> want to look up where an operating system is, and how we start it.
>>>>
>>>> The how may be answered by multiboot.
>>>>
>>>> The where is your mission, should you choose to accept it.
>>>>
>>>> Where in this case means which physical drive, which partition and
>>>> which file.
>>>>
>>>> Look at the different existing solutions for this problem to see if
>>>> one of them will work for us, or if they can be improved upon to fit.
>>>
>>> Alright, this is an entirely honest question, how complex is the mbr?
>>> And how standardized is it? What's required to access it? And the big
>>> question, would it be possible to create a new mbr that could be
>>> easily parsed by FILO, but still compatible with fuctory BIOS,
>>> possibly by using a method similar to windows chainloading? Just
>>> throwing this out there, no idea if/how it would actually work.
>>>
>> It is pretty darn simple, it tells a few bits about the drive and where
> to
>> find the first boot sector of the Active partition. But it is a 16bit
>> binary blob normally executed in real mode. We could create our own FILO
>> MBR, but I don't know if that would be the right solution eithor....
> 
> Why not? If legacy free is the way we're gonna go, why not get rid of
> the legacy MBR while we're at it?
> 
Hmm. You got me thinking, the gears are turning. We would have to deal with
a binary blob though instead a simple text file. pros vs cons?
-- 
Thanks,
Joseph Smith
Set-Top-Linux
www.settoplinux.org