Re: [Etherboot-developers] image file format and BIOS use

[Ken Y. <ke...@nl...>]

|If I remember correctly, there really shouldn't be that many BIOS
|calls in that code. Off the top of my head you have:
|
| - calls to output messages to the screen; you can probably remove
|   those.
|
| - calls to determine the maximum memory size. Since you know your
|   hardware, you can either hardcode this value or you can provide
|   your own code to determine the memory size.
|
| - code to move the ramdisk image around in extended memory. Since
|   the code executes in real mode, we have to ask the BIOS to do this
|   for us. You can either remove support for ramdisks, or you can
|   manipulate the memory descriptors yourself and then write your
|   own code for moving the image.
|
|I believe, that's it. I am sure, somebody will correct me if I am
|wrong.

Yes, that's about it. Except in mknbi-1.1 ramdisk copying is no longer
done by a BIOS call, it's done by longword copying since first32.c
executes in protected mode. It also allows ramdisks to be above 16MB,
one reason for using mknbi-1.1.