Interrupts needed by LILO

daniel.engstrom at riksnett.no daniel.engstrom at riksnett.no
Fri Nov 27 10:23:33 CET 1998


On 26 Nov, M Carling wrote:

> Perhaps I'm confused. Shouldn't OpenBIOS be able implement the functionality
> of LILO? 
Not necessarily, but of cause, we could.
 
> I thought that LILO existed because BIOS16 are incapable of loading
> anything that isn't DOS-like. 
No, the BIOS can't load DOS either. The BIOS loads the first sector of
the first floppy if it ends with 0x55, 0xaa, if not it applies the same
test to the first sector of the first hard disk. Then it tries to enter
the ROM_basic :)
There is a DOS boot loader the fist sector if a bootable floppy or DOS
partition. In the first sector of a hard disk there is a master boot
program which loads and executes the first sector of the active
partition.
 
> Doesn't LILO look to the BIOS like DOS? 
No, the LILO boot sector looks like a boot sector as does the DOS boot
sector. 


> That sounds right. So why have a new LILO? Why not just not need LILO 
> anymore?
Because of flexibility? And we don't need to use LILO. We might tech
the firmware of a (OS independent) boot FS that could hold the boot
loader. Afaik. Sun does something like this.

/Daniel
-- 



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