Hello everybody,
I am tracing the boot kernel process (http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Linux-i386-Boot-Code-HOWTO) and I have a question: GNU/GRUB loads vmlinuz at 0x7c00 memory, does not it? And then, the first instruction CPU executes is in bootsec.S, does not it? Have I understood well?
The PC BIOS load and execute the first 512 bytes of a Linux kernel (eg bootsect.S) when the kernel was dumped on a floppy disk. The so called boot sector was loaded a 0x7c00 and in charge of loading the whole kernel in memory. Then it ran the setup code before transfering control to the kernel. [who use this today ... with kernel far bigger than 1.44MBytes btw, bootsect.S is no more included in the kernel. Floppy booting rely on syslinux] A boot loader such as Lilo and GRUB load the kernel image in memory and transfer control to the setup code. Regards. -- Yann Droneaud OPTEYA