[syslinux] memdisk etherboot integration

H. Peter Anvin hpa at zytor.com
Tue Jun 15 16:16:54 PDT 2004


Gordon Dey wrote:
> Folks:
> I've used etherboot to create a zrom that successfully brings a image of a 
> bootable floppy into high memory. What I'd like to do is glue memdisk in so 
> that it can hook int13 and serve the transferred image for booting when 
> etherboot hands control back to the BIOS.
> 
> The trick, and this is where I'd appreciate "gotchas", pointers or "this is an 
> approach I used" thoughts, appears to be gluing Peter (HPA)'s memdisk.asm 
> nasm code (3.0.8) into etherboot (5.3.7 soon .8) gcc (3.3.4) code. 
> For example, It appears to depend on nasm to generate the necessary 
> _binary_memdisk_bin_{start|end|size} labels for finding the header and patch 
> locations, and for copying down to 16:16 memory. Stuff that a simple port 
> won't do.
> 

As far as Etherboot is concerned, memdisk is a kernel image.  Unfortunately 
there is a bug in Etherboot (actually, in mknbi) which makes memdisk not work 
with compressed images at the moment.  See the etherboot-devel mailing list 
for more information.

	-hpa




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