Syslinux - Jun 2004 - memdisk etherboot integration

Folks:
I've used etherboot to create a zrom that successfully brings a image of a 
bootable floppy into high memory. What I'd like to do is glue memdisk in so 
that it can hook int13 and serve the transferred image for booting when 
etherboot hands control back to the BIOS.

The trick, and this is where I'd appreciate "gotchas", pointers or
"this is an
approach I used" thoughts, appears to be gluing Peter (HPA)'s
memdisk.asm
nasm code (3.0.8) into etherboot (5.3.7 soon .8) gcc (3.3.4) code. 
For example, It appears to depend on nasm to generate the necessary 
_binary_memdisk_bin_{start|end|size} labels for finding the header and patch 
locations, and for copying down to 16:16 memory. Stuff that a simple port 
won't do.

Thoughts?
73, Gord.

Gordon Dey wrote:
> Folks:
> I've used etherboot to create a zrom that successfully brings a image
of a
> bootable floppy into high memory. What I'd like to do is glue memdisk
in so
> that it can hook int13 and serve the transferred image for booting when 
> etherboot hands control back to the BIOS.
> 
> The trick, and this is where I'd appreciate "gotchas",
pointers or "this is an
> approach I used" thoughts, appears to be gluing Peter (HPA)'s
memdisk.asm
> nasm code (3.0.8) into etherboot (5.3.7 soon .8) gcc (3.3.4) code. 
> For example, It appears to depend on nasm to generate the necessary 
> _binary_memdisk_bin_{start|end|size} labels for finding the header and
patch
> locations, and for copying down to 16:16 memory. Stuff that a simple port 
> won't do.
> 
As far as Etherboot is concerned, memdisk is a kernel image.  Unfortunately 
there is a bug in Etherboot (actually, in mknbi) which makes memdisk not work 
with compressed images at the moment.  See the etherboot-devel mailing list 
for more information.

	-hpa