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