Re: Kernels > 1M
H. Peter Anvin (hpa@transmeta.com)
Sat, 07 Aug 1999 16:00:30 -0700
Riley Williams wrote:
>
> Hi Peter.
>
> I've now analysed the code, and the enclosed patch does a large part
> of what is necessary for the kernel loaders to support kernels over
> 1023k in size, but it doesn't do all of it. I'd like your comments on
> the patch so far, and also on what's left to do.
>
> First, whilst the patch to build.c that you suggested will allow the
> kernel to compile ok with `make bzImage`, the resulting kernel will be
> unstable and most probably will not work at all.
>
> The reason for this is that the current kernel loader uses the value
> of a 16-bit unsigned int in the boot sector as the number of 16-byte
> paragraphs of kernel source to load, thus only supporting kernels of
> not more than 0xFFFF0 (1,048,560) bytes in size. Worse still, the
> value stored in this word is the lower 16 bits of the calculated
> value, so if the kernel was, say, 0x107630 (1,078,832) bytes ( in
> size, the stored value would be 0x00763 paragraphs, or about 30k !!!
The kernel would work fine, *unless* you use the pathetically old
bootsect.S loader.
However, fixing that bug is a plus.
-hpa
--
<hpa@transmeta.com> at work, <hpa@zytor.com> in private!
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