Re: [Etherboot-developers] Windows 98 slow booting

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

ebi...@ln... (Eric W. Biederman) writes:

> Michael Brown <mb...@fe...> writes:
> 
> > On 16 Oct 2002, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> > > > For 5.1, it's trickier, as Eric says as if Etherboot is running above 1
> > > > MB and you can't turn it off there and then.
> > > It isn't a lot trickier, as there is always code that runs below 1MB
> > > to jump to the entry point.   So we just need to include the
> > > code in stub that jumps to the 16bit entry point.  That is a little
> > > trickier because that one piece can no longer be in C. :(
> > 
> > It's not just the 16-bit entry point that needs it - it's also needed
> > whenever Etherboot returns to the BIOS, or boots from disk.
> 
> Right.  In particular for 5.1
> exit16, and xstart16 need to have the code to disable the A20 line.
> Given the complexity of that code figuring out how to share code
> between those two cases is desireable.
> 
> 5.1 is cleaner in what actually needs to be modified, than 5.0.  It
> is just more of a pain because you cannot do it in C.

I haven't gotten to this yet.  I'm busy trying to get some changes
into 2.5.x before the feature freeze.  But I did run across a weird
system where you cannot disable the a20 line.  So we need to be
careful how this gets implemented...

Eric