BTX on USB pen drive

[John Baldwin]

On Friday 07 March 2008 06:40:04 pm Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 07, 2008 at 11:51:49PM +0100, Dimitry Andric wrote:
> > On 2008-03-07 15:13, John Baldwin wrote:
> > > Try this instead:
> > > 
> > > http://people.freebsd.org/~jhb/patches/btx_real.patch
> > 
> > Hi John,
> > 
> > I've encounted way too many machines already with BIOSes that clash with
> > the regular btx loader... :(
> 
> Have we considered sgetting rid of BTX and using a different bootloader
> altogether on FreeBSD?  There's got to be some open-source, non-GPL
> bootloaders which work better than our current.
> 
> The reason I mention this is because the number of problem reports with
> BTX continue to rise, and debugging them is very painful since due to
> the way the crash is reported, no one can easily report a full register
> dump.  I suppose if the latter was addressed, the former could be solved
> quicker.

BTX is actually quite small.  BTX is just a small kernel that lets us 
write /boot/loader (and all of libstand) in C w/o worrying about real mode 
segmentation, etc.  In one sense this patch _does_ get rid of BTX in that it 
now runs the BIOS in real mode rather than virtual 86 mode.

-- 
John Baldwin