21 Sep
2010
21 Sep
'10
8:32 p.m.
Brian Palmer schrieb:
It seems there are some severe technical limitations
to a PE FreeLoader.
Can you please elaborate on that? What limitations are there?
I can only see one minor limitation: Booting from a floppy or harddisk
with FAT16, which is smaller than 300MB, where freeldr gets fragmented
in the first few clusters. freeldr doesn't even fit on a floppy and
reactos doesn't fit on a HDD smaller 300 MB. So why should that be an
issue? Even if it was, it's easy to overcome, by adding a bootsect2.bin,
containing the fathelper code.
We can improve on the situation by minimizing the PE header to one
sector. That would reduce the critical size to 64MB.
Btw, win98's io.sys has a DOS exe ("MZ") file header the bootsector
loads multiple sectors into memory before transferring execution to
io.sys that loads the rest of itself.
Unless there are good reasons for it to remain a PE
file (and I don't think
easier debugging is a good reason), I would like to see the PE changes to
FreeLoader reverted.
Easier debugging IS definately a very good reason!
Regards,
Timo