Casper Dik's Weblog

Wednesday April 27, 2005

The End of Realmode Boot I've already mentioned two great new features in our current development release; ACPICA and USB hotplug.

But there's one change that's much more far reaching than that: Newboot.

Most Solaris x86 users will be familiar with the blue screen/device configuration assistant/boot sequence and how ancient some of that feels. Perhaps few are aware that the DCA is actually a realmode DOS like environment where each boot device requires its own realmode driver. These drivers needed to be compiled with a 16 bit compiler and 16 bit MASM, not available for ready money anywhere. While the official build environment required NT, I managed to build it on environments ranging from MS Windows 98 and 2000 on actual PCs to Caldera DOS 7 on a SunPCi card (which allowed for automatic building which was great fun). Now that this piece of shameful history lies in the past, I am not afraid to confess.

But as of last Sunday, April 17th, 2005, we have "legacy free" newboot. Newboot uses grub with ufs support so we now have native grub support and a menu we can edit from inside Solaris. Device enumeration completely done using ACPI

Because it skip the device configuration assistant and boot a single large file with all kernel device drivers which makes startup quite a bit quicker and allows us to boot from any bootable device as long as we also support it in the kernel so we can mount root.

And we've reverted back to white on black consoles; this again takes some getting used, surprisingly enough.

One thing to note is that before you may had to disable ACPI in the kernel and the BIOS; with Newboot + ACPICA, you actually stand a much better chance of the system working with all the default settings: ACPI on, ACPI 2.0 enabled. Even legacy USB enabled now has a much better chance of working than before.

But this is a radical change an PC BIOSes and hardware being like it is, interesting times ahead. SO please test drive when this hits Solaris Express in a few months time.

As of this writing, it's a bit in the balance whether you'll get to see the source first as part of OpenSolaris or the binaries as part of a Solaris Express. (2005-04-27 00:00:00.0) Permalink Comments [14]