Hi David!
I'm sorry for you, but FBSDBOOT will never support ELF binaries :-(! As
developer of this utility I had a discussion about supporting ELF when ELF was
introduced into FreeBSD. The reason, why ELF support was not integrated is, that
the new boot loader and the kernel rely on the state of the hardware, BIOS
and BIOS extensions.
Since booting DOS modifies the lower memory and hardware settings (eg. sets
registers, or modifies interrupt vectors) this state will not exist, when you
start FBSDBOOT. FBSDBOOT itself *can not* restore this state and therefore
fails to start up the ELF binary (loader and/or kernel).
Of course, there is a well known address in the BIOS, where the original
interrupt descriptor table is located, but restoring this table is not enough.
You also have to re-initialise the various devices (eg. Adaptec Controller). But
you can't control the behaviour of the BIOS init routines; eg. the Adaptec BIOS
clears the lower memory and thus the FBSDBOOT code :-(!
I'm sorry, but I think FBSDBOOT is died with aout :-(!
Ciao,
Christian.
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