On Thu, 9 Dec 1999, Neil Blakey-Milner wrote:
> On Thu 1999-12-09 (02:46), Robert Watson wrote:
> > Once we get into boot2 land, I recognize the FreeBSD-specific loading
> > code, etc. What I don't know much about is those first three 512-byte
> > chunks of code. Boot0 appears to be booteasy, but given some ignorance
> > about the i386 boot process, I'm not sure whether it's loaded by mbr, or
> > by the bios, and where it lives partition-wise. Similarly, how boot1 fits
> > into it the whole scheme--I assume this is FreeBSD-specific as it knows
> > about boot2, but don't know where it lives, etc. Preferably, afterwards,
> > also drop the results into sys/boot/i386/README. :-)
>
> I wrote up some basic stuff, which doesn't seem quite to describe
> what you're after, but which may be of use, at
> http://rucus.ru.ac.za/~nbm/boot/
>
> It's intended for the handbook, but I haven't had time since starting
> my new job to work on it much more.
Looks interesting, but doesn't seem to mention the mbr/mbr.s code, and I'm
not sure how this fit into the picture. There seem to be three 512-byte
chunks of code:
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 512 Sep 16 18:46 mbr
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 512 Sep 16 18:46 boot0
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 512 Sep 16 18:46 boot1
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 7680 Sep 16 18:46 boot2
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 131072 Sep 16 18:46 loader*
When there were two of them, I understood pretty much what was going on.
Now there are three, and I clearly haven't been keeping a close enough eye
on what is going on, because now I'm confused whereas previously I wasn't
:-).
Robert N M Watson
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.watson.org/~robert/
PGP key fingerprint: AF B5 5F FF A6 4A 79 37 ED 5F 55 E9 58 04 6A B1
TIS Labs at Network Associates, Safeport Network Services
To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
