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

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

On Mon, Mar 29, 2004 at 12:52:12AM +0100, Henning Makholm wrote:
> Scripsit Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>
> 
> > I have not seen the code, so if someone describe this in detail to me, I
> > can then write a free reimplementation.
> 
> > Now, we probably don't have the toolchain to do this, and a full cross
> > compiler for a handfull of instructions is not worth it.
> 
> Huh? Is the bootsector use written in a kind of machine language that
> the regular as(1) for the architecture does not support? I thought
> that i386 was the only platform with *that* problem.

I suppose that the boot sector may contain a bit more than the standard
elf or coff format. Not sure though. It may contain checksum info or
such, or magic stuff, or whatever. I have not looked at it (and should
not for a clean room implementation), so i cannot really say.

This is mac os though, which dates back to 84 or earlier.

> Things like boot sectors are quite reasonable to write in assembly
> language.

Ok.

Friendly,

Sven Luther