First of all, I successfully booted Haiku from CD-ROM from several machines today. It took a bit longer than I thought, as no emulator that I have access to seems to support multi-session CDs, and not every BIOS I have works by the book. The boot device selection is still very simplistic, so it might not end up booting completely from CD if you just inserted it, and didn’t choose “Boot from CD-ROM” in the boot loader - but you’ll have to bear with that currently.
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 :-)
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.
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.
