Re: booting a ELF binary

[Ton Biegstraaten <a.w.w.m.biegstraaten@twi.tudelft.nl>]

Richard Gooch wrote:
> 
> Rogier Wolff writes:
> > Ton Biegstraaten wrote:
> > > The program to be started should setup those low mem tables, then
> > > loading the OS and start it, the priciple is easy,as usual.
> > > I have a bootflop(SVR4 of course :-(), is it easy to change it into a
> > > ramdisk?
> >
> > Ton,
> >
> > Ik dacht dat er een manier was om van een bootflop een mkbni (of hoe
> > dat ding ook heet) image te maken. De bootrom laat dan de boel achter
> > in precies dezelfde staat als dat de BIOS met een boot-flop doet. Als
> > de image op de flop dan echter direct naar de flop gaat om de rest op
> > te halen ben je nat.....
> 
> The programme is called "mknbi-linux", BTW. If you have the
> application binary you want to run (a SVR4 binary, right?), then you
> can simply put that into a ramdisc as /sbin/init, and the kernel will
> run it when it boots.
Yes, but then you're within Linux. And the program I'm talking about is
an OS itself and so needs the whole machine ... Linux certainly won't
allow this. I'll have to write my own mknbi program that sets up the
system, I'm afraid ...

> If the application is only on your boot floppy, extracting it could be
> fun :-)
Yeah, I know, you must know the layout and structure of the disk tables
for SVR4, and then you may pick blocks ..., there's no guarantee the
file is contiguous on disk, physically, at least that's what I tried and
it failed.

Ton
-- 
Name: Ton Biegstraaten              Tel : +31152782467
Org.: TU Delft, Faculty ITS         Fax : +31152787141
      Zuidplantsoen 4               Mail: A.Biegstraaten@twi.tudelft.nl
      2628 BZ Delft, The Netherlands