[LinuxBIOS] comments about Linux BIOS

[ron minnich]

On 1/8/07, Stefan Reinauer <stepan at coresystems.de> wrote:
> * Chris Cannon <burryme at hotmail.com> [070102 04:35]:
> > I am surprised that the list of payloads is not comprehensive; ie.
> > apparently Linux BIOS doesn't provide a straight boot from MBR. This
> > confused me. If this is not a goal, I would suggest making it a goal. This
> > reflects my own philosophy that end-user interests are best served by
> > compatibility.
>
> It is somewhat possible with ADLO, but at this time, there is a lot of
> fiddling involved to get it working.

if you're really determined to support this, I think the best way to
do it is to build on our emulator. I.e. load the MBR and support its
calls via emulation, not direct execution a la ADLO. We've found the
emulator to be very solid, and in fact, somebody is working on
plugging it in to plan 9 to improve their VESA support. So you would
load the MBR, run it under emulation, and take it from there.

The best way, in my view, is to boot linux in flash and have linux
kexec the actual OS you want to boot. But this is tricky. The
advantage is that you can debug such a system completely under Linux,
without linuxbios being involved, until you get it figured out.

But is it possible to boot Vista under Linux via kexec? That would be
interesting.

ron