Re: ppc

[Yoshinori Okuji]

 --- address@hidden wrote:
> - The multiboot standard for ppc... ¿What would be the better way to
>   extend it? ¿Should all the standard to be reorganized in order to
>   support more than one architecture?... 

Please call it Multiboot Specification rather than Multiboot Standard. The name
has been changed.

How to extend it to PowerPC? That is a difficult question but quite
interesting.

There was an idea that could make the specification more extensible. Currently,
it defines a big table which points to external memory regions, and uses
bitfields to identify which members are valid. That's not good. Everytime you
want to add new features, you would have to find a unused field and define new
members, etc.

So the idea was to make the Multiboot information a list of tagged items.
Conceptually, like this:

memory size: 16MB
arguments: root=/dev/hd0s1

If we define the information this way, it is straightforward to define
arch-specific tags and common tags. Then, a developer of an OS wouldn't have to
change the bootstrap code very much.

One question is that the current specification is widely used, so people might
not want to migrate to a new version.

Okuji