[syslinux] pxelinux & memdisk

[H. Peter Anvin]

H. Peter Anvin wrote:

> Dave Puchyr wrote:
> 
>> Excellent, excellent work, Peter!
>>
>> Is it possible to unload memdisk and the initial ram disk after 
>> chaining to a subsequent shell?  I'd like to boot a small dos image 
>> via pxelinux & memdisk that creates a large ram disk containing core 
>> Win98 files in a compressed volume, then mount the compressed volume, 
>> fire up Win98 from it, and then unload memdisk and the initial, small 
>> ram disk.
> 
> No.  There simply is no way whatsoever to do that generically.
> 


I probably should clarify why.  The problem is hiding the memory that 
the ramdisk uses.  In order to do it in a reasonable OS-independent 
manner, we have to intercept the BIOS memory-sizing calls and hide 
memory that way.  However, that's an awfully permanent operation.

I might incorporate decompression in a future version of MEMDISK, 
however.  It's not really that hard to do, it's just work.

	-hpa