On August 26, 2016 12:26:52 AM PDT, Eric Auer <e.a...@jpberlin.de> wrote: > >Hi HPA! The boot sector takes a BIOS drive number of the >to-be-booted drive from the MBR, which can take it from >the BIOS. There also are patches to take the MBR item by >pointer from the MBR, but those are not used by default. > >So I guess the kernel could take the drive number from a >boot sector, which at the moment is easy because the boot >sector stores the value from the MBR in the drive byte of >the boot sector loaded into RAM, which is a predictable >location in general. Might be fun for booting from 0x81. > >>> support for EXT3 in the kernel would indeed be large/complex. > >Would not do that, but would boot DOS by MEMDISK and load a >full EXT3 driver from there later :-) Same for ISO9660, but >there "read files from ISO root dir" might be quite small, >so boot without MEMDISK might be interesting as well... > >>> Regarding the idea to have the kernel "natively boot from a >>> RAMDISK in HIGH MEMORY which would NOT be A: or C: ... Well, >>> on modern computers it should not be a problem to "hog" the >>> drive letter of the A: floppy drive - you probably have at >>> most ONE real floppy next to that ramdisk anyway and letter >>> B: is still free :-) So in that sense, MEMDISK is ok for me. > >Exactly :-) > >> So this is a horribly stale discussion, but it seems that all that is >> needed is the ability to hide somewhere a preferred drive letter for >the >> FreeDOS kernel to pick up and use. It is trivial to add support for >> passing such information along in MEMDISK. >> >> -hpa
Hi! Memdisk already supports being a disk number other than 0x00 or 0x80, and the DL register will reflect that. However, I was thinking of provided a more explicit hint, so that scripts can reply on the ramdisk being, say, R: -- Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse brevity and formatting. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-kernel mailing list Freedos-kernel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-kernel
