Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
There is another possibility: Use the recently published official documents about the data expected by NTLDR and successors.
I think the ReactOS loader uses this information. It can load several commercial versions of Windows meanwhile.
If someone from the coreboot community could help the reactos developers, I think they would be eager too, to see their bootloader load windows on top of coreboot.
While this does not help the *BSD use of ADLO, the Windows use of it could be scrapped and we'd probably end up with a lot less code than what ADLO is now.
I doubt that. ADLO is now 461 lines of assembler code. Most of which is comments. That is only for a single platform, because it really is a hack. When integrating this loader, it would become saner at almost no cost.
While I think using our own NTLDR is an option for the problem of booting windows, we should also think about having a sane way of integrating 16bit bios calls. Otherwise we will not get the chance to be the default firmware on motherboards out there. Even EFI systems do that.
Stefan