SONE Takeshi ts1@cma.co.jp writes:
On Fri, Jun 13, 2003 at 06:48:55PM +0900, SONE Takeshi wrote:
If one added a (trivial) Multiboot header in the head.S, the resulting kernel could be loaded from GRUB, while it could also be loaded by ELF boot of LinuxBIOS and Etherboot?
It probably could.
Turns out it can't.
And now you see one of the many reasons GRUB has not yet been ported to run under LinuxBIOS.
GRUB can't load Multiboot (or other ELF) kernel below 1MB! Since bzImage kernel starts at just 1MB, placing 'converter' and gdt elsewhere after 1MB is not a trivial task..
A bzImage had a real mode component that must be run below 1MB.
Currently I place the ramdisk at 8MB, and the converter and the real mode code could be placed on top of that. I do something like this for the Itanium.
Still it is less than satisfactory to require that to happen. 0-640K is always known to be there so we should be able to use it.
Hopefully some time will open up and I can put out another ELF booting specification.
Eric