On Friday 2025-09-05 08:09, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
>Please keep in mind that SILO works with blocklists meaning that you >can't place the kernel in arbitrary locations and reference them as >files. Not how I remember it. x86 LILO kept blocklists of the kernel file, so you had to rerun it all the time. SILO on the other hand kept a blocklist on some drivers (/boot/*.b), and rerunning silo was only needed when a new silo.deb was installed, not when placing kernels. In any case, the boot process seems exceptionally similar between x86 and SPARC OBP; x86 firmware loads sector 0 and OBP loads sector 1 (because someone decided to put a disk label at sector 0 instead). Once your 512-byte program runs, you have free reign to load whatever other code in whatever complex ways you can think of.
