[OpenBIOS] Why protected mode?

[Kevin Lawton]

AndreasHofer wrote:

> Hi, Brian,
> 
> that is exactly what I was looking for all the time --- just booting Linux
> on a bare machine whithout any BIOS. Could you give me some pointers on
> that?


One of the guys from FreeMWare compiled a trim Linux which
could be loaded straight into the memory of bochs and
soon in FreeMWare without needing the BIOS.  We used
some hacks in bochs to set up the CPU registers in
protected mode etc.  It works.

Essentially, we didn't want to implement the 16bit stuff
for now, and wanted to boot straight into 32bit protected mode.

Seems like you could do the same thing, putting the Linux
image in a ROM rather than read it from a file etc, and
ROM'ing just a little startup code too.

-Kevin
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