Re: booting a ELF binary

[Richard Gooch <rgooch@atnf.CSIRO.AU>]

Ton Biegstraaten writes:
> 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 ...

Ah, didn't realise you had a whole application/kernel rolled into one
(deleted the start of the thread before I took notice).

> > 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.

Perhaps the mknbi-dos programme would be more suited to hacking than
mknbi-linux (might be a bit simpler)?

				Regards,

					Richard....