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

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

ke...@us... (Ken Yap) writes:

> >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.  
> 
> Hmm, that suggests that it's possible to remove the rom_header from this
> chain and have boot1a.s load the rest, perhaps with the help from an
> auxiliary script to set a word in boot1a.s indicating how many blocks to
> load. Then boot1a.s would not be subject to the 127.5 kiB limitation of
> ROM images.

Yep.  That is the direction I have been going in 5.1.x.

The floppy loader was checking checksums etc, and it was non-trivial
enough that I simply have not done the work to make that case work.

I would have to check but I think the floppy loader may actually be the
last holdout.
 
> In the past the floppy loader was used to check that the ROM image would
> work, but I think the production process is reliable enough that we can
> believe that prepending loader.S will produce a valid ROM.

And also note that loader.S is now very much simpler, as the 16->32 bit
code and the decompresser have been move out of it.

Eric