[syslinux] Syslinux roadmap, revised

[Steffen Winterfeldt]

On Wed, 21 Oct 2009, H. Peter Anvin wrote:

> On 10/20/2009 09:48 PM, Steffen Winterfeldt wrote:
>> 
>> I've looked into it a bit and it looks like turning gfxboot into a com32

Ok, I have a basic version ready. It uses comboot call 3 (run command) to
start the kernel for now. But what I really want to do is load kernel &
initrd in the com module and then use one of the cleanup-shuffle-and-boot
functions to run the kernel.

Just a few questions:

- I haven't looked everywhere but maybe is there already code that does that
   (setup & boot a loaded kernel & initrd)?

- syslinux puts (ISTR) the initrd at the end of memory; is that really
   necessary?

- Does malloc() access _all_ memory or just the first or the biggest block
   (from the e820 map)?

>> module (with the current api) is not a problem. It will need a big enough
>> low mem bounce buffer, though.
>
> How big?

Depends a bit on the gfxboot core code size. I'm using slightly less than 60k
at the moment, so the provided 64k are ok for now.


Steffen