[syslinux] KRNLINUX? CPIOLINUX?

[Paul Bolle]

On Thu, 2011-08-18 at 22:37 -0700, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> On 08/16/2011 06:03 PM, Shao Miller wrote:
> > Does anyone think that it might be a worth-while effort to code a 
> > Syslinux variant which is a "Linux x86 kernel"-format binary and whose 
> > "initrd" is a simple cpio archive which will comprise the root filesystem? 
> > [...]
>
> There are definitely use cases for this.  It would be interesting to have.

Does this have to be a new variant?

Wouldn't it be possible to tweak LDLINUX.SYS just enough so that it
would also be a Linux (x86) kernel? So you end up with a single binary
that could either be loaded directly by a boot sector (if installed by
syslinux itself) or by any bootloader that knows how to load Linux (x86)
kernels (in which case LDLINUX.SYS would check whether and initrd was
also loaded by the bootloader).

If I remember correctly grub2 does something similar: it's "core" image
is also multiboot compliant and can therefore be loaded by any
bootloader that knows how to handle multiboot images (and not just by
the boot sector code that the grub2 installer generated).

Even if all that is possible the next question is, of course, whether
the complications - ie, two code paths for two ways of loading a single
binary - would be worth the benefits.


Paul Bolle