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New ISO-9660 SILO boot block

From:  Ben Collins <bcollins@debian.org>
To:  sparclinux@vger.kernel.org
Subject:  New ISO-9660 SILO boot block
Date:  Mon, 14 Apr 2003 09:53:26 -0400

This affects anyone making bootable CD's for sparc. As you may all know
the old cd.b boot block required a patched mkisofs, since it needed the
cd.b block rewritten with the block/length of the second stage
bootloader, and the second stage loader also needed to be rewritten with
the silo.conf location.

You may also know that the patch required to do this has never been
accepted into cdrtools properly, for no other reason than the author of
that code is not willing to accept it on the grounds of it not being
"standard". I wont even go into that whole argument.

I've gotten tired of fighting the cdrtools author, and more recently
Debian's own cdrtools package maintainer (go figure, Debian's own
cdrtools has lost the ability to create bootable SILO sparc CD's).

So I wrote a smallish first stage loader (< 7680 bytes to fit into the
space requirements) that actually reads rockridge enabled iso9660
partitions. There's a few cavaets like the second stage loader and
silo.conf location being hardwired in /boot, but that's not so bad, IMO.
Because it parses rockridge, it should follow symlinks nicely.

So, second.b gets loaded from a hard coded path, but can be arbitrarily
located in the image itself. Second.b gets rewritten with the silo.conf
location and partition number on-the-fly at boot time, so no need to
rewrite it when creating the iso9660 image.

I've only been able to test this on sparc64's, so I need some folks with
v0/v2/v3 proms to test this aswell. You can get the latest SILO CVS
(this hasn't been released yet till I can get it tested) from CVSROOT of
:pserver:anonymous@cvs.silo.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/silo

If you alreahy have this checked out, be sure to add the -d option when
doing a "cvs up" since the new boot block is in a new directory.


Now maybe I can get some sleep.

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