"ron minnich" rminnich@gmail.com writes:
I think we have a lot of control with the ROM payload, so much so that requiring it to locate itself above 512K is a simple thing to do. LinuxBIOS does not load general payloads, just ROM payloads, and it is reasonable to create some restrictions.
There are a couple of options here. Ideally linuxbios would execute from the end of ram instead of the beginning which would mean all architecturally defined addresses would be free for use for the payload. I think I handle this in etherboot by simply running from the end of memory.
It does sound like this is going to have to be a 2 step process, decompress and then load. So really only the code for the final load step has to get out of the way.
I do know it can be nice to handle something fairly arbitrary and it really wasn't that much code.
Eric