[ros-dev] Unable to use FreeLDR

[Timo Kreuzer]

Brian Palmer schrieb:
> It seems there are some severe technical limitations to a PE FreeLoader.
>   
Can you please elaborate on that? What limitations are there?
I can only see one minor limitation: Booting from a floppy or harddisk
with FAT16, which is smaller than 300MB, where freeldr gets fragmented
in the first few clusters. freeldr doesn't even fit on a floppy and
reactos doesn't fit on a HDD smaller 300 MB. So why should that be an
issue? Even if it was, it's easy to overcome, by adding a bootsect2.bin,
containing the fathelper code.
We can improve on the situation by minimizing the PE header to one
sector. That would reduce the critical size to 64MB.

Btw, win98's io.sys has a DOS exe ("MZ") file header the bootsector
loads multiple sectors into memory before transferring execution to
io.sys that loads the rest of itself.

> Unless there are good reasons for it to remain a PE file (and I don't think
> easier debugging is a good reason), I would like to see the PE changes to
> FreeLoader reverted.
>   
Easier debugging IS definately a very good reason!

Regards,
Timo