Over at the osdev.org forums, they’re hosting a brand new Bootsector Competition. Entries are limited to 512 bytes, and must be able to work with both FAT12 and FAT16 file systems. Each entry must be capable of locating a 32-bit ELF file in the filesystem, parsing the ELF headers, and executing the ELF binary. All entries are ISC licensed, and two prizes (in the form of Amazon.com gift certificates or donations to the PDPC/Freenode) are at stake, in addition to bragging rights. For the full contest rules, and how to enter, check out the forum post.
The winner will be the one who first submitted an entry that passed all the tests and the runner-up will be the one who got the most votes from the community? So the guy with the better solution comes in second. Weird.
Edited 2010-01-15 10:10 UTC
I don’t get it.
i386-only asm
FAT12/FAT16
32bit ELF
media <8GB
512b sectors
What is this hack supposed to be for? The first 4 are already very obsolete, and the latter will be rendered obsolete once Western Digital’s new 4KB sector size standard (already out) gets adopted by the other drive makers (which is expected).
So this is basically just for old USB sticks? >8GB sticks exist already (and most sticks are using FAT32 anyway – for the LFN support).
Trying to support ancient hardware that a modern *nix kernel can likely not even run on?
The hardware/software they seem to be targeting here will be obsolete and nonexistent within a few years anyway… if not already – seriously, i386 only?
Why not just use a multi-stage bootloader so you don’t have to worry about doing all of your magic inside of 448 bytes? Is avoiding the extra tens of KB for second stage bootloaders really necessary or needed for media that has storage capacities now routinely into the high multiples of gigabytes?
Why?