A fork of tiny-linux-bootloader that is floppy-bootable and still fits in the first sector. This bootloader expects to find the kernel immediately after it at sector 1.
I wrote this because I was annoyed that syslinux took 200kb and lilo was too cursed (how did people live with that thing in the 90s/early 00s?)
- The boot sector is likely too large to fit in a partition table, but if you're booting off a floppy, i'd assume it's in your initrd anyway
- Separate initrd support has been commented out (you could add it back in) -- to get around this, compile your kernel with the initrd embedded using
CONFIG_INITRAMFS_SOURCE - By default build.sh and config.inc makes 1.44mb floppy images -- if you want to use 1.722mb or other sizes, you will have to edit config.inc and build.sh to accomodate
- No partition table needed
- Easy to convert to an obfuscated loader (think anti-forensics for crypted disks)
- Easy to modify for a custom experience
- Useful in embedded devices
To build, you need to:
- Edit build.sh and set paths to your kernel
- Edit config.inc to set your kernel cmd line (keep it <15chars for the moment, disabling debug makes more room)
- Run build.sh
- Now you can dd this onto your disk, if you have a partition table already, then do not overwrite bytes 446-510 on the first sector (so use dd twice).
Your system should now boot with the new kernel.
You can use qemu to boot the image by running:
qemu-system-i386 -fda disk.img
and you can also connect the VM to gdb for actual debugging. There's an included gdb script to get you started.