Re: [Etherboot-developers] Etherboot 5.1.7 (development) released

[<ebi...@ln...>]

ke...@us... writes:

> I have released Etherboot 5.1.7 at http://www.etherboot.org Please try
> it out.
> 
> Changes from 5.1.6:
> 
> + Broadcomm TG3 support by Eric Biederman.
> 
> + Georg Baum found that the start16.S prefix is still needed for LILO
> and PXE images, those formats were broken. He also migrated the PCI IDs
> into the driver files. Those formats should work again.

Actually saying start16.S is still needed is exactly backwards.

To clarify.
A binary image is built by first building .img and the taking things
in front of it.

So for pxe we have:
pxeprefix start16 .img

And similiarly for lilo:
liloprefix start16 .img

start16 just performs the transition from 16 to 32bit mode.

For zpxe and similary for zlilo we have:
pxeprefix start16 unnrv2b .zimg 
And .zimg is just .img compressed using the nrv2b algorithm.

Older code like the floppy loader always builds the .rom files and looks like:
floppyprefix rom_header start16 .img

Things are simpler in the makefile for .dsk images because it happens
in two separate steps instead of just one.  

So in summary start16 is needed whenever we are starting in 16bit mode
and things like the pxe loader and the lilo loader can take advantage
of that by skipping the need to be a .rom image first.

Eric