Date: Thu, 2 Mar 2000 19:10:27 +0100 From: Christian Gusenbauer <Christian.Gusenbauer@netway.at> To: davidd@stack.nl Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD-boot Message-ID: <00030219400601.00224@bones.my.domain>
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Hi David! I'm sorry for you, but FBSDBOOT will never support ELF binaries :-(! As developer of this utility I had a discussion about supporting ELF when ELF was introduced into FreeBSD. The reason, why ELF support was not integrated is, that the new boot loader and the kernel rely on the state of the hardware, BIOS and BIOS extensions. Since booting DOS modifies the lower memory and hardware settings (eg. sets registers, or modifies interrupt vectors) this state will not exist, when you start FBSDBOOT. FBSDBOOT itself *can not* restore this state and therefore fails to start up the ELF binary (loader and/or kernel). Of course, there is a well known address in the BIOS, where the original interrupt descriptor table is located, but restoring this table is not enough. You also have to re-initialise the various devices (eg. Adaptec Controller). But you can't control the behaviour of the BIOS init routines; eg. the Adaptec BIOS clears the lower memory and thus the FBSDBOOT code :-(! I'm sorry, but I think FBSDBOOT is died with aout :-(! Ciao, Christian. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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