[Etherboot-developers] booting non linux images

[Anuradha R. <anu...@gn...>]

Hello,

We have setup dhcp/tftp on debian 2.2 and things are working fine with a
linux kernel tagged with mknbi-linux.

We need to run a progarm called memtest86 which runs stand alone, i.e., it
is completely contained in a bootable image. Its booting procedure is
based on _very_ old linux kernels. And many signatures and magic numbers
seem to be minix compliant. Therefore mknbi-linux doesn't work.

I read in the tagged image spec that any image with bytes at offsets 510
and 511 set to 55 and aa (may be the other way) is also valid, and this
image _does_ contain those values. But etherboot doesn't detect it. I am
extensively going through source code to get things fixed. I found that
the file main.c does not check for these values. However the files in
contrib/baremetal/main.c (line 461) _does_ this with wrong pointer
manipulation.

Also I understand a tagged image with a second magic number should be
loaded at 0x10000 (not the boot sector which comes to 0x7c00) and not to
0x100000. Does etherboot handle this?

Anuradha