Syslinux - Oct 2009 - memdisk: not enough memory

Hallo,

I'm just playing with memdisk and memdisk-iso - nice play.

But there's one problem: they first load all their contents into local  
memory and then try to work.

I just loaded a CD *.iso (Ubuntu-Server installation DVD), about 650  
MByte. My laptop has only 512 MByte RAM: "not enough memory".

I had expected such a message - ok.

But when using memdisk then I'd like to use not only FDs but (now) CDs  
and (later) DVDs and BDs.

Is there any way to "mount" bigger *.iso files instead of loading them
into local memory?

Viele Gruesse!
Helmut

Good day Helmut,

You wrote about MEMDISK not using RAM to emulate a BIOS drive.

I believe that you are referring to mapping a contiguous range of
sectors on some BIOS drive 0xXX to an emulated drive 0xYY.  This is
something that I would like to see, too.

Under an OS such as Linux or Windows, you'd need some way to perform
this mapping again once the OS is loaded, since these OSs do not use the
BIOS INTerrupts that MEMDISK establishes.  Fortunately, Linux has
'losetup' & 'dmsetup' (device-mapper) and Windows has
'filedisk' (and
others).

Mapping in this way is not implemented in MEMDISK nor in "MEMDISK-ISO"
at this time.  But such a "MAPDISK" is possible. :)

What underlying media would you want your DVD .ISO files to sit on, just
out of curiosity?  An HDD?

- Shao Miller