[syslinux] Boot kernel on a different drive/partition

[Ram Yalamanchili]

Hey,

I have this support working fine. I'll send some patches out next
week, but I have partition support integrated into open()/read() calls
(i bypass calling into the syslinux intcalls to read/open files,
instead do it all in the C library using the io.c calls I sent a patch
for last week), but you can also do this with any com32 module. I'm
not sure if Peter will have any part of these patches in syslinux, but
I can maintain a patch page on the wiki.

FWIW, my use case is to have a fallback bootloader. So, if a boot
failed from one partition, it would boot from another partition. This
is for an embedded system where the bootloader itself is on a 3rd
partition but firmwares are on two separate partiitons.

thanks.

--
Ram

On 4/13/07, H. Peter Anvin <hpa at zytor.com> wrote:
> Andrew Goodbody wrote:
> >
> > syslinux plus a comboot program in a floppy image integrated into a BIOS
> > which will do some custom processing before launching the kernel which
> > will be on an hdd. Actually the kernel may have been loaded into RAM
> > before it is booted but I still need the comboot program to be able to
> > read files from the hdd.
> > I know the comboot program can do what it likes and read the hdd
> > directly but I want to use the file system support in syslinux rather
> > than writing that from scratch and if I do that I could almost drop
> > syslinux entirely anyway.
> > So I would be happy with a new comboot API function to change what
> > syslinux thinks of as its default drive. From that point I could access
> > the files on the hdd.
> >
>
> It's not a trivial thing that you ask for, but it's not undoable,
> either.  It pretty much comes down to reinitializing most of syslinux,
> but without reloading the configuration file or anything like that.  As
> such, it requires a fairly careful change, but it's not undoable.
>
> Now, it's important to realize that this will have to close any open
> file descriptors.
>
>         -hpa
>
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