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

[Kevin O'Connor]

On Sun, Nov 11, 2018 at 02:12:09AM +0300, Mike Banon wrote:
> > 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?

Just the loss of 14MB of ram.  It seems odd to reserve that ram when I
expect one would rarely use it.  Arguably, seabios shouldn't reserve
even 1.4MB of ram if one isn't actually booting from the given image,
but extending this to every image found when most wouldn't even be
accessible seems even worse.

>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

Okay, thanks.  We're planning to make a SeaBIOS release in a few days
and this change would be post release anyway.

-Kevin