please test: i386 bootloader changes

[Hans Petter Selasky]

On 01/21/15 17:30, Adrian Chadd wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Here's something that I've been poking for a little while.
>
> The SeaBIOS emulation in the Chromebook C720 implements the E820
> memory map by putting a hole between 15 and 16MiB. That's some really
> legacy PC-AT stuff right there. Unfortunately that stops
> kernel.GENERIC from loading as loader thinks there's only < 14MiB of
> extended RAM available.
>
> This patch:
>
> https://people.freebsd.org/~adrian/c720/20150121-seabios-loader-changes-2.diff
>
> updates it so if the first extended segment from the E820 call is too
> small, it tries the E801 call. It also fixes a bug in the E801 call
> that would treat the lower and upper memory regions returned as
> contiguous when they may indeed not be.
>
> Now - here be dragons. It's possible that fixing this stuff for one
> buggy bios makes freebsd's loader unhappy on other buggy bioses. So
> I'd really appreciate if it people would try this out on 32/64 bit x86
> platforms and report back success/failures. So far nothing I have here
> complains, but I don't have /that/ much hardware.
>
> Thanks,
>

Hi,

What is the simplest way to install the loader changes?

Can it be tested by replacing "/boot/loader" or do I need to update any 
boot partition code using "gpart bootcode" ?

--HPS