[coreboot] Convert Assembly JMP to C

Russell Whitaker russ at ashlandhome.net
Fri Sep 12 07:20:54 CEST 2008



On Fri, 12 Sep 2008, Joseph Smith wrote:

>
>
>
> On Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:24:32 -0400, "Corey Osgood" <corey.osgood at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> On Fri, Sep 12, 2008 at 12:19 AM, Joseph Smith <joe at settoplinux.org>
> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:13:18 -0400, "Corey Osgood"
>> <corey.osgood at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>> On Thu, Sep 11, 2008 at 10:31 PM, Peter Stuge <peter at stuge.se> wrote:
>>>>> Joseph Smith wrote:
>>>>>> So for Linux do you mean reading /etc/fstab to find the /boot label
>>>>>> and going from there???
>>>>>
>>>>> No, that is a much later problem.
>>>>>
>>>>> We are at the stage when all we know are physical hard drives, and we
>>>>> want to look up where an operating system is, and how we start it.
>>>>>
>>>>> The how may be answered by multiboot.
>>>>>
>>>>> The where is your mission, should you choose to accept it.
>>>>>
>>>>> Where in this case means which physical drive, which partition and
>>>>> which file.
>>>>>
>>>>> Look at the different existing solutions for this problem to see if
>>>>> one of them will work for us, or if they can be improved upon to fit.
>>>>
>>>> Alright, this is an entirely honest question, how complex is the mbr?
>>>> And how standardized is it? What's required to access it? And the big
>>>> question, would it be possible to create a new mbr that could be
>>>> easily parsed by FILO, but still compatible with fuctory BIOS,
>>>> possibly by using a method similar to windows chainloading? Just
>>>> throwing this out there, no idea if/how it would actually work.
>>>>
>>> It is pretty darn simple, it tells a few bits about the drive and where
>> to
>>> find the first boot sector of the Active partition. But it is a 16bit
>>> binary blob normally executed in real mode. We could create our own FILO
>>> MBR, but I don't know if that would be the right solution eithor....
>>
>> Why not? If legacy free is the way we're gonna go, why not get rid of
>> the legacy MBR while we're at it?
>>
> Hmm. You got me thinking, the gears are turning. We would have to deal with
> a binary blob though instead a simple text file. pros vs cons?

A while back Seagate announced they are stopping production of the ATA 
hard drive. In a few short years the MBR will have gone the way of the
5.25 inch floppy. Even now there are some live-cd distros that don't
need a hard drive.

   Russ




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