[coreboot] [RFC] port bochs-bios to gcc

[Carl-Daniel Hailfinger]

On 25.02.2008 10:44, Stefan Reinauer wrote:
> I do believe we should merge what we call ADLO as another loader into 
> v3. Augusto Pedroza wrote a patch for that for GSoC iirc.
>
> Just like we have ELF loading and lar segment loading and VSA loading 
> now.
>
> Maybe we could even use the VSA loader to run bochs bios, instead of 
> ADLO? It's all 16bit lumber ;)
>
> Then using BIOS compatibility would just mean putting a bochsbios.bin 
> into the lar.
>
> ADLO is so fragile because it was written in assembler (so no stack is 
> needed?!?), reimplementing all the things we have in coreboot in C. So 
> recognizing that it just another loader would simplify and stabilize 
> things quite a bit.
>
> Someone might say we can do this with libpayload or by adding a lot of 
> chipset specific code to ADLO and rewrite it from scratch. Then we're 
> at 2500 lines of code instead of 25 and we have a nasty multi-staging.

There is another possibility: Use the recently published official 
documents about the data expected by NTLDR and successors. 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.

Comments?

Regards,
Carl-Daniel

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