[coreboot] Convert Assembly JMP to C

[Joseph Smith]

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....

--
Thanks,
Joseph Smith
Set-Top-Linux
www.settoplinux.org