Everything is in place now, and the boot loader is even passing all information to the kernel to be able to boot from a CD. It’s not yet working though, as the VFS is only evaluating the partition offset of the boot volume, and nothing more.
It’s probably only a tiny bit left, so I try to finish it tomorrow - in my spare time, as I usually don’t work during the weekend :-)
We have also agreed on not making demo CDs (images only, of course) available before the whole system runs a bit more stable. Compared to a hard disk image, a CD image is likely to be tested by a lot more people - and therefore, the first impression should not be too bad.
Since Ingo and I started working on CD booting at BeGeistert, we have (or rather, he has) written a TAR file system for the boot loader. When your IBM compatible computer boots, the BIOS emulates a boot floppy for a CD-ROM instead of giving you access to the disk directly. In order to access the whole disk, we need a CD-ROM driver - and therefore, we also need the kernel to execute the driver.
Be’s and our solution writes the kernel and all modules needed for booting from CD-ROM (or any other device unsupported by the BIOS) behind the boot loader to the boot floppy (ie. boot session of the CD). As on-disk structure, we use standard gzipped TAR files that contain all the needed files. The boot loader will start the kernel from the TAR file, and the running kernel will then detect the CD-ROM and try booting from there - at least that’s the theory. Right now, we have the TAR file system working in the userland boot loader test environment.
Getting Haiku to boot from CD to the usual Terminal window is my first assignment as an Haiku Inc. employee. If no unforeseen problems arise, I hope to get it done today or tomorrow.
This blog is supposed to accompany my Haiku development efforts while being employed by the non-profit organisation behind Haiku , Haiku Inc.
Thanks to the donations you made to Haiku Inc., I will work full time until the end of november - that means 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. I’m not getting rich by doing this, but it should be enough to pay my bills. I don’t even get more money if you would donate more - it would just make such an event more likely to happen again. Thanks for making this happening, anyway.
I intend to regularly update this blog during the next few weeks to give you an overview over what I am currently working on, and how I progress doing it.
