[Etherboot-developers] Seperating out the x86 BIOS calls...

[Eric W B. <ebi...@ln...>]

O.k. I just took a moment to skim the code to see what it would really
take to seperate out the x86 bios calls.  And all it requires
is to have a seperate stack for 16bit calls.  There may be some loader
issues as well, I have not looked at that in detail.

I would probably add a table of function pointers, as well so that 
the address of the 16bit code does not need to be known at compile
time.  For the PXE case that is a significant consideration.

Regarding the loader, I am starting to seperate out the decompressor
from the rest of the code, so I can use the decompressor when booted
under LinuxBIOS.  Saving 6 out of 17k is pretty significant in my
book.  What I am aiming at is an inplace (or at least in bss)
decompressor that runs in 32bit mode.

If that works we can permanently move the decompressor out of loader.S
and possibly make that file readable, instead of #ifdef spagetti.

Eric