Re: Multiboot Specification

[David Holloway]

On Sunday 24 February 2008 13:01, Vegard Nossum wrote:
> My rationale is that it may be difficult to ensure that the header in 
> fact resides within the first 8 KB of the kernel image.

Actually it is quite easy to ensure the header is within the first 8KB.
Just pad the custom-object-format-of-choice with the multiboot header.
The actual file will no longer be a standard object type, but will work.

In practice, the 8KB limitation is not severe.  Nearly every OS has
a small assembly language file that ends up at the beginning of the image.

Frequently, operating system vendors put pretty little copyright notices
in this small assembly file.  Adding a multiboot header is trivial.

If one must mingle the multiboot header with executable code, just add
a jmp instruction around the header.