[syslinux] vesamenu back to text before booting

[Thorsten Glaser]

On Fri, 5 Dec 2014, Ady wrote:

> A link to original documentation is very useful. Links to manpages 
> and/or to CVSweb are both fine. Some users might prefer the man page 
> (which might or might not be up-to-date and/or enough), and the CVSweb 
> content might be valuable for others.

OK, sure.

The sources are mostly in
https://www.mirbsd.org/cvs.cgi/src/sys/arch/i386/stand/
(boot/ is the entry point here), plus some stuff in
https://www.mirbsd.org/cvs.cgi/src/sys/lib/libsa/

> Regarding EXTLINUX, why would it be trickier than for SYSLINUX? Do you 

Figuring out the block numbers the loader occupies. Our first stage
loader (bootxx/ in CVS; bootxx_ustarfs loads from a tar archive) is
actually a shell script that takes block numbers from stdin (for ISO,
they are easily calculated from isoinfo). We don’t normally use ext2fs
natively, so we don’t have an equivalent -info tool. (One could always
install it in the space between partitions, but…)

> Regarding the c32 module, have you actually tried with chain.c32 as 
> suggested? There are options already available in chain.c32 regarding 
> the address. As previously suggested, read the 2 wiki pages about 
> chain.c32.

Ah, interesting. Let’s see…

http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php/Doc/chain#hand is unclear
about what a handover area is (contains) and where it’s passed
(if hptr is given, DS:SI appears to contain it).

Other than that… it has keepexe for PXE, and a boot loaded from
SYSLINUX usually doesn’t need image the patching that bootxx
does. I assume DL and a stack are set up. Though, it doesn’t gain
much from using pxechn.c32 and mboot.c32 especially as the latter
can pass files from SYSLINUX’ partition via memory (the COMBOOT
API provided a way for boot to access SYSLINUX’ partition, but
that’s gone). Still, probably a good idea to try this out (after
figuring out the values to use) and document it visibly.

bye,
//mirabilos
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