[coreboot] Convert Assembly JMP to C

[Corey Osgood]

On Fri, Sep 12, 2008 at 1:20 AM, Russell Whitaker <russ at ashlandhome.net> wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, 12 Sep 2008, Joseph Smith wrote:
>
>>
>>
>>
>> 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?
>
> A while back Seagate announced they are stopping production of the ATA hard
> drive. In a few short years the MBR will have gone the way of the
> 5.25 inch floppy. Even now there are some live-cd distros that don't
> need a hard drive.

I call bullshit. I found one news article on it, not linked to a press
release or any substantiating evidence. Can't find a PR on Seagate's
website or anywhere else. And I can't honestly imagine that there's so
much of a difference between PATA and SATA hard drives that no longer
manufacturing PATA drives would have any considerable impact on their
bottom line. 5 1/4" drives were around when only geeks and secretaries
had PCs, that's just not the case today. If you know where there's an
official announcement, please, send me the link.

-Corey