On Sun, Nov 11, 2018 at 02:12:09AM +0300, Mike Banon wrote:
However I'm concerned that this would reserve memory for all of the floppy images in the e820 map (and thus the final OS would not be able to use that memory).
sorry Kevin I'm not fully understanding the consequences. Would reserving e820 memory for all the floppies - result in a slightly lower amount of available RAM to OS (e.g. just 14 MB lower if I add 10 floppies) or there could be more serious problems?
Just the loss of 14MB of ram. It seems odd to reserve that ram when I expect one would rarely use it. Arguably, seabios shouldn't reserve even 1.4MB of ram if one isn't actually booting from the given image, but extending this to every image found when most wouldn't even be accessible seems even worse.
When I've been testing this patch - together with "35 boot menu entries" patch by Ivan - https://mail.coreboot.org/pipermail/seabios/2017-June/011416.html
- I added about 30 floppies and everything seemed to work perfectly.
If there are no other possible problems, I am okay with slightly lower amount of RAM - and only the "multiple floppies" users will be affected. Also, what's good about this patch is that its' only a small change for SeaBIOS source code - mostly placing the "floppy searching" code inside the "for" cycle. But I could try to do something with the allocation part if that wouldn't turn out too difficult
Okay, thanks. We're planning to make a SeaBIOS release in a few days and this change would be post release anyway.
-Kevin