Yes. BIOS. Real mode. Not that I've been missing them these 30 years, and they are still in place. It gives a weird feeling.
I mean, if you target ancient baroque hardware like e.g. ZX Spectrum, you specifically target an ancient machine. But this is expected to work on any modern x86 hardware, while it feels like code for a 80286, and likely would run there. And this ancient stuff is still supported and actively used.
How much emulation is required to get System/360 code running on a modern IBM mainframe? Can the CPUs still run the original 32-bit code? Do CCWs and whatever other peripheral code still work?
Intels X86S proposal[1] gives perspective on this. Both in how there would be reasons to get rid of legacy, and how yet it still got shot down pretty quickly[2]. It's unfortunate that I don't think we ever got more explanation on it's termination, where did the opposition come from
It's not supposed to be better than lilo, just code golf. Limine is pretty much the only serious bootloader gunning for the spot lilo/elilo was going for.
I love MBR hacking, it's so fun to see. Cf. sector lisp [1] and OSle [2].
[1]: https://github.com/jart/sectorlisp
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43866585
This is Bootloader ID #11 with comments
See:
http://sebastian-plotz.blogspot.de
https://docs.kernel.org/arch/x86/boot.html
I use this bootloader in gokrazy and blogged about debugging a limitation in it a while ago: https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2024-02-11-minimal-linux...
https://sebastian-plotz.blogspot.com/
yeah im always low key impressed this old boot stuff still works now - makes messing with it feel kinda worth it
Kind of cool, but being exclusively for BIOS/MBR kind of kills my excitement.
With EFI, you can just boot straight into Linux without any bootloader.
Technically there's a pe shim, no?
You can just package Linux as a PE executable.
Yes. BIOS. Real mode. Not that I've been missing them these 30 years, and they are still in place. It gives a weird feeling.
I mean, if you target ancient baroque hardware like e.g. ZX Spectrum, you specifically target an ancient machine. But this is expected to work on any modern x86 hardware, while it feels like code for a 80286, and likely would run there. And this ancient stuff is still supported and actively used.
> this ancient stuff is still supported and actively used.
It sort of warms my heart that code for the IBM 360 (now IBM Z) and the IBM PC (now x86 PC) can still run on modern hardware decades later.
On one hand, we're stuck with the legacy of the past. But on the other hand, we can build on things and don't need to reinvent them unnecessarily.
How much emulation is required to get System/360 code running on a modern IBM mainframe? Can the CPUs still run the original 32-bit code? Do CCWs and whatever other peripheral code still work?
Intels X86S proposal[1] gives perspective on this. Both in how there would be reasons to get rid of legacy, and how yet it still got shot down pretty quickly[2]. It's unfortunate that I don't think we ever got more explanation on it's termination, where did the opposition come from
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36013257
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42468664
Do I see it right that I need to recompile and reinstall it on each new kernel?
I don't see how this is better than lilo.
It's not supposed to be better than lilo, just code golf. Limine is pretty much the only serious bootloader gunning for the spot lilo/elilo was going for.
It’s not meant to be full-featured. It shows how to write a bootloader that’s smaller than 512 bytes.