From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Thu, 20 Dec 2001 13:36:19 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Thu, 20 Dec 2001 13:36:10 -0500 Received: from neon-gw-l3.transmeta.com ([63.209.4.196]:21767 "EHLO neon-gw.transmeta.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Thu, 20 Dec 2001 13:36:04 -0500 Message-ID: <3C222F84.4060509@zytor.com> Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 10:35:48 -0800 From: "H. Peter Anvin" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.6) Gecko/20011120 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en, sv MIME-Version: 1.0 To: "Eric W. Biederman" CC: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: Booting a modular kernel through a multiple streams file / Making Linux multiboot capable and grub loading kernel modules at boot time. In-Reply-To: <200112181605.KAA00820@tomcat.admin.navo.hpc.mil> <3C205FBC.60307@zytor.com> <9vrlef$mat$1@cesium.transmeta.com> <3C218BF3.6010603@zytor.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Eric W. Biederman wrote: > > Agreed. And to completely dispel the myth. Etherboot has been doing > something similar for years. It disables interrupts in 32bit mode so > it doesn't have quite as much work to do but otherwise it is pretty > much the same picture. > If you disable interrupts in 32-bit mode a lot of things will not work. > I finally tracked down the reason why Setup.S is run in real mode, > instead of being called from protected mode. And that is in extremely > hostile environments (like loadlin works in) loading the kernel wrecks > the firmware callbacks. So you must do your BIOS calls as a special > case before you switch to protected mode. No, it's because it was easier to do it that way -- do all BIOS calls once and for all in the early part of the execution of the kernel, and then forget about it. -hpa