On 1/8/07, Stefan Reinauer stepan@coresystems.de wrote:
- Chris Cannon burryme@hotmail.com [070102 04:35]:
I am surprised that the list of payloads is not comprehensive; ie. apparently Linux BIOS doesn't provide a straight boot from MBR. This confused me. If this is not a goal, I would suggest making it a goal. This reflects my own philosophy that end-user interests are best served by compatibility.
It is somewhat possible with ADLO, but at this time, there is a lot of fiddling involved to get it working.
if you're really determined to support this, I think the best way to do it is to build on our emulator. I.e. load the MBR and support its calls via emulation, not direct execution a la ADLO. We've found the emulator to be very solid, and in fact, somebody is working on plugging it in to plan 9 to improve their VESA support. So you would load the MBR, run it under emulation, and take it from there.
The best way, in my view, is to boot linux in flash and have linux kexec the actual OS you want to boot. But this is tricky. The advantage is that you can debug such a system completely under Linux, without linuxbios being involved, until you get it figured out.
But is it possible to boot Vista under Linux via kexec? That would be interesting.
ron