to the El Torito standard for CD booting, a CD may boot in "No emulation"
mode without using a floppy image. In this mode, the BIOS loads a program
off of the CD into memory and creates a BIOS device using 2048 byte sectors
for the CD. According to the standard, this program can be up to 0xFFFF
virtual (512-byte) sectors long. The old cdldr depended on this by having
the BIOS load the entire loader and the small cdldr stub as one binary
similar to pxeboot so that cdldr didn't have to read the CD to find the
loader. However, the NT no emulation loader just uses 1 disk sector
(4 virtual sectors), so it seems that at least some BIOS writers just did
enough to get NT to boot by only loading 1 sector and ignoring the sector
count. Thus, while cdldr should have worked in theory, it doesn't in
practice. This replacment fits entirely in 1 sector and includes simple
ISO 9660 support. It looks for /boot/loader on the CD and loads it up
using the BIOS. This allows us to not have to depend on the limited size
of floppy images but use a full GENERIC kernel for CD-ROM installs in the
future, among other things.
This version of cdboot is a bit bloated as it includes some useful
debugging routines that people can pull to use in other x86 assembly
modules. Even with all the debugging cruft, we still have 272 bytes to
spare.
- Don't hard code 0x10000 as the entry point for the loader. Instead add
src/sys/boot/i386/Makefile.inc which defines a make variable with the
entry point for the loader. Move the loader's entry point up to
0x20000, which makes PXE happy.
- Don't try to use cpp to parse btxldr for the optional BTXLDR_VERBOSE,
instead use m4 to achieve this. Also, add a BTXLDR_VERBOSE knob in the
btxldr Makefile to turn this option on.
- Redo parts of cdldr's Makefile so that it now builds and installs cdboot
instead of having i386/loader/Makefile do that. Also, add in some more
variables to make the pxeldr Makefile almost identical and thus to ease
maintainability.
- Teach cdldr about the a.out format. Cdldr now parsers the a.out header
of the loader binary and relocates it based on that. The entry point of
the loader no longer has to be hardcoded into cdldr. Also, the boot
info table from mkisofs is no longer required to get a useful cdboot.
- Update the lsdev function for BIOS disks to parse other file systems
(such as DOS FAT) that we currently support. This is still buggy as
it assumes that a floppy with a DOS boot sector actually has a MBR and
parses it as such. I'll be fixing this in the future.
- The biggie: Add in support for booting off of PXE-enabled network
adapters. Currently, we use the TFTP API provided by the PXE BIOS.
Eventually we will switch to using the low-level NIC driver thus
allowing both TFTP and NFS to be used, but for now it's just TFTP.
Submitted by: ps, alfred
Testing by: Benno Rice <benno@netizen.com.au>
- Fix btxldr to preserve a NULL bootinfo pointer when it copies the kernel
arguments.
- Add the cdldr bootstrap program. This program is tacked onto the
beginning of the standard 3rd stage boot loader (/boot/loader) to form
the CD boot loader (/boot/cdboot). When a CD is booted, the cdboot file
is copied into memory instead and executed. The cdldr stub emulates the
environment normally provided by boot2 and then starts the loader. This
booting method does not emulate a floppy drive, but boots directly off of
the CD. This should fix the problems some BIOS's have with emulating a
2.88 MB floppy image.
- Add support to the loader to recognize that it has been booted by cdldr
instead of boot2 and use a simpler method of extracting the BIOS boot
device.
