Enhancing cdboot [patch for review]

[Luigi Rizzo]

On Mon, Dec 08, 2008 at 04:29:04PM -0800, Maxim Sobolev wrote:
> Luigi Rizzo wrote:
...
> >4. another nitpick -- the value you pass in %si to the MBR does not
> >   seem to point to anything useful. As discussed about boot0.S and
> >   the followup in the mailing lists, there seems to be no standard
> >   but at least some MBR expect %si to point to a partition entry,
> >   so you should probably initialize one in a way similar way to that
> >   used by boot0.S
> 
> Hmm, maybe I misunderstood it then. What do you mean by "point to 
> partition entry exactly"? Right now it points to the beginning on MBR.

ok, so here is what I know.

Even though there is no standard, at least ldlinux.sys and perhaps
other bootloaders expect %si to point to a 16-byte record containing
the partition descriptor (same structure as one of the 4 records
at 0x1be in the MBR) for the partition they were loaded from.

ldlinux.sys uses this info to "relocate": it knows the location of the
other sectors of ldlinux.sys relative to the beginning of the partition,
and uses the start-of-partition from the record at %si to compute
these locations in terms of absolute disk positions.

Note that in principle a MBR does not need this info -- even if it
is a multi-sector boot code such as boot0ext, it may well assume to
be located at offset 0.

On the other hand if the code on the MBR uses %si, then you should
set the entry so that at least the starting CHS and LBA info point
to the first sector on disk, i.e. CHS=0,0,1 and LBA=0.

In practical terms -- make %si point to a 16-byte area of memory
containing all 0's except for the byte representing the sector
number for the start of the partition.
See the code in a recent sys/boot/i386/boot0/boot0.S which gives
some details on this.

	cheers
	luigi