GSoC

Google Summer of Code 2007

Booting Windows and other Operating Systems in LinuxBIOS

The goal of this sub project is to figure out how to boot Windows Vista/XP/2003. There are three approaches that might proof successful:

• using a dedicated LinuxBIOS loader (ie. adapting ReactOS FREELDR)
• booting Windows on top of Linux using kexec/kboot
• fixing ADLO so that it boots Vista/XP and removing the mainboard dependencies in it's code.

Port Grub2 to work in LinuxBIOS

Grub2 is going to be _the_ bootloader of choice in the forseeable future. As such, it could replace both Grub legacy and FILO, the LinuxBIOS hack for grub compatibility. FILO lacks many features that come with grub2 with no extra effort.

This task splits into four sub-problems:

• Add a target i386-linuxbios, next to i386-pc and i386-efi to the configuration process
• Add an IDE driver that does direct access instead of intXX calls
• Make the build process generate a single static ELF image, like it is done on Sparc
• Add support for reading the memory size from the LinuxBIOS table.

SCSI booting in LinuxBIOS

Currently LinuxBIOS can not boot from an arbitrary SCSI controller. There are two solutions for the problem:

• Use Linux and Kexec. This requires to keep the SCSI driver in the flash chip.
• Use x86emu/vm86/ADLO and the int13 method. This would allow to use the PCI option rom available on all modern SCSI controllers.

So we obviously need a solution based on the later. This could as well be implemented as a Linux program, if you prefer that.

Contact

If you are interested in becoming a GSoC student, please contact Stefan Reinauer or Ronald Minnich