Re: Silly question, why still stage1 separate from stage2?

[John Summerfield <debian herakles homelinux org>]

Jesse Keating wrote:
> So I have a silly question, and it's ok to tell me I'm dumb, but I was
We don't need to:-)

> thinking this morning, why do we still have stage1 vs stage2?  Stage1
> is pretty much about getting you stage2, or minstage2 right?  And in
> most cases where you're not booting from media, you're stuffing one of
> those two into ram right?  So why can't they be combined and just be
> one stage?
>
> Here's my thought.
>
> The initrd we load from pxe or from media could be stage2, or

Aren't we in 8086 mode in PXE?
How much RAM can we use?
How big is stage2?
What execution model does Linux expect to start in?
What about other platforms?



> minstage2.  User choice at boot time (yes we'd lose autodiscovery of
> the lowmem case, but really?).  PXE seems to handle this and yes you'd
> be downloading more content over the DOS networking stack instead of
> the Linux networking stack, but is that so terrible that we have to do
> really dirty things with stage1?
>
> So let me know cases where you think a split stage1 vs (min)stage2 are
> really needed.  I'd like to know!




--

Cheers
John

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