kernel boot
Albert Cahalan (albert@ccs.neu.edu)
Wed, 6 Sep 1995 13:57:32 -0400
> From: Werner Almesberger <almesber@lrc.epfl.ch>
> Date: Sat, 2 Sep 1995 11:05:03 +0200 (MET DST)
>
> unstripped kernels are another possibility with the following
> drawbacks: they probably shouldn't be compressed either (objdump
> and such want to lseek, so you couldn't just pipe the kernel
> through gunzip), which slows down the load process and it also
> makes them too big to load below 640kB. Since huge kernels will
> grow beyond that limit anyway the sooner or the later, boot
> loaders will have to be able to load beyond 1 MB, so the use of
> unstripped kernels would only change the schedule.
How much time is left?
My idea of a nice system would be a large (150k or so) boot loader
that can read the filesystem via the bios and use 386 code to
move the kernel above 1 meg. Add a nice color menu of course, and
a way to add modules to the kernel.
Since that much real mode assembly would be awful, I'd suggest using
a DOS compiler and replacing the run time library with a BIOS-only one.