Re: Booting a modular kernel through a multiple streams file / Making Linux multiboot capable and grub loading kernel modules at boot time.

[H. Peter Anvin]

Eric W. Biederman wrote:

> 
> Agreed.  And to completely dispel the myth.  Etherboot has been doing
> something similar for years.  It disables interrupts in 32bit mode so
> it doesn't have quite as much work to do but otherwise it is pretty
> much the same picture.
> 

If you disable interrupts in 32-bit mode a lot of things will not work.

> I finally tracked down the reason why Setup.S is run in real mode,
> instead of being called from protected mode.  And that is in extremely
> hostile environments (like loadlin works in) loading the kernel wrecks
> the firmware callbacks.  So you must do your BIOS calls as a special
> case before you switch to protected mode.

No, it's because it was easier to do it that way -- do all BIOS calls 
once and for all in the early part of the execution of the kernel, and 
then forget about it.

	-hpa