Re: CD-ROM booting staus update

[Robert Millan <rmh@aybabtu.com>]

On Wed, Jul 04, 2007 at 08:10:29PM -0400, Alex Roman wrote:
> On 04/07/07, Alex Roman <alex.roman@gmail.com> wrote:
> >On 04/07/07, Uwe Hermann <uwe@hermann-uwe.de> wrote:
> >> On Tue, Jul 03, 2007 at 11:14:40PM -0400, Alex Roman wrote:
> >That will be the second stage of my Summer of Code project... Provided
> >people have no objections against my patch, and all is well, I will
> >soon start working on an ATA driver that will allow directly reading
> >from a CD-ROM drive.
> 
> Bear in mind, though, that current CD-ROM boot sectors (e.g. ISOLINUX)
> rely on Int 13h calls to continue the boot process. This means that,
> even though writing an ATA driver will allow GRUB to boot a CD on a
> platform which doesn't provide legacy interrupts, the loaded boot
> sector won't work properly after being booted.
> 
> A possible solution to this is to write a rudimentary Int 13h handler
> which will make use of the ATA driver...

Since we're on free software, we can do better.  Instead of sticking to an
obsolete interface, we can define our own in both sides.  E.g. define how
a CD layout has to be to be bootable by BIOS-less GRUB.

-- 
Robert Millan

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