[SeaBIOS] [PATCH] ramdisk: search for all available floppy images instead of one

[Mike Banon]

> 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? 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




On Sat, Nov 10, 2018 at 9:16 PM Kevin O'Connor <kevin at koconnor.net> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Nov 02, 2018 at 01:07:20AM +0300, Mike Banon wrote:
> > All the floppy images available at CBFS will be found and listed in a
> > boot menu, instead of the first found. Could be highly valuable if you
> > are participating in a hobby OS development - would like to test
> > multiple versions of your floppy in the same coreboot image, to reduce
> > the amount of re-flashes and accelerate the development at bare metal
> > - or simply would like to access multiple floppies as a coreboot user;
> > for example: KolibriOS (nice assembly OS with GUI), FreeDOS, Visopsys
> > and memtest (coreboot's own memtest version is a bit buggy, e.g.
> > external USB keyboard isn't working there at some laptops)
>
> Thanks.  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).  I think if multiple floppy support was
> desired then we'd want to delay memory reservation until after a
> particular image was selected in the boot menu.
>
> -Kevin