FYI: some thoughts about stage1 development

[Wolf Lammen]

The mysterious call to the floppy probing in stage 1 is still an unresolved
issue to me. As Okuji-san advised me, I first read through the archived mail
list. But after having read a year's amount of material, I finally got sick
and tired of it. To shed some light on the situation, I went through the
revisions of stage 1 in the CVS instead.
Here is my report, for those of you interested in software development,
especially that of stage 1. I focussed on the topics of my 5 patches sent in
recently, and that hard to understand program logic around the probing BIOS call
in the CHS code path of stage 1.
A reader should have some familarity with the contents of stage 1 to see the
details. To me, it was instructive and enlightening to see, how common
shortcomings in software design and documentation finally evolve into
bugs/errors/misconceptions.

Have fun

Wolf Lammen


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revstage1app.txt
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