Re: [PATCH] Remove lilo-loads-only-five-sectors-of-zImage-fixup fromsetup.S

From: H. Peter Anvin
Date: Wed Oct 11 2006 - 15:43:51 EST


Alexander van Heukelum wrote:

The patch should not alter behaviour for any bootloader that takes
setupsects into account. It just removes 'support' for bootloaders that
have the size of the setup code hardcoded to 4 sectors.

The current version of setup.S already checks if the bootloader
understands boot protocol 2.00+ in the case of a big kernel, but that
code is also after the 2k-mark. The zero-page still has some unused
space between offsets 0x230 and 0x28f. Shall I put/move some code there
to check unconditionally if the type_of_loader has been set?

I'll do that if no objections are put forward.


The test can be done long before the zeropage is needed. It should pretty much be done right away.

What I'm saying is that instead of pushing the initialization code downwards, the E820 & EDD space could overlay the code. It would have been better, of course, if it was in a completely different chunk of the address space, but that's probably a much bigger change.

-hpa
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