Re: Debian-installer, older hardware, boot loaders, miboot & amiboot & ..

[Matthew Garrett <mgarrett@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Sven Luther wrote:

>  1) A description in text form of what the individual bits of this 1K
>  boot sector does, and what is needed for miboot booting.
>  2) a small C program or shell script which generate said 1K boot
>  sector from some kind of more formal version of the above description.

If you can document the functionality of the code (and "this instruction
followed by this instruction followed by this instruction" isn't good
enough - describe what's happening) and if someone else then writes an
implementation based on that and releases it under a free license, we
can ship it.

>This doesn't solve the other problem, and namely the fact that miboot
>and other boot loaders are not buildable from main without a
>considerable cross compiler development effort, which may not be worth
>it.

Yes, that's somewhat more of an issue. I'd expect amiboot to be
buildable without excessive effort, although the Amiga includes aren't
Free. We can't really ship amiboot as part of d-i anyway - it's a
loadlin equivilent, not a syslinux one. Amiga-lilo used to exist and
could be installed into the RDB. I'd be interested to know what sort of
state that was in. It's a significantly saner alternative.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59-chiark.mail.debian.legal@srcf.ucam.org