Custom Lilo

[flyingbear]

Is there a way to make virtual floppy drive so that i can make a lilo boot floppy using that virtual floppy drive?

Let me explain...

We have this patched version of LILO that does booting with hardware configuration measurement and also several other measurement to TCGA compliant security chip during the bootup. (We changed first.S and second.S in the lilo source.) The fact of the matter is that we don't trust the reliability of this LILO and we decided not to mess with the MBR and instead we just made LILO boot floppy.

Now several years have passed and computers don't ship with floppy disk drives anymore (especially laptops). I've seen ways to convert LILO boot floppy into bootable CD with the help of El Torito, but this does not work on systems that do not have floppy drive...cause you can't make the LILO boot floppy to begin with. I've tried building LILO boot floppy on another machine that has the same kernel image that i'm trying to boot off and then I tried to make bootable cd off that floppy disk image. But later I found that LILO is sort of machine specific so that the bootable CD doesn't really do the job. (Is this true? You can't run one's machine's LILO boot floppy on another machine even if the location of the root matches in the config??)

So what I need is the ability to write to a location in HD as if it was a floppy drive (some /dev/fd0 simulation) and then be able to create a boot image off that and make iso and burn it. The simulation of floppy is what I'm wondering about the most. Is there any way to do this?

PS I looked into Live CDs but I don't know much how to tweak it so that it'll use my custom LILO to boot...

[comtux]

Do you have to use lilo?
Could you use grub or syslinux?
I have never heard anything about 1 lilo boot floppy not working on another machine i have switched intire harddrives useing lilo i just had to unload and reload some modules and do a couple of other things with the kernel.
Im not really sure on how to use lilo to build a live cd.
I use grub or syslinux but ill look into it.
Sure there is away to do what yout talking about.
If you can think it up it can be done.

Couldn't you create a small fat filesystem on your drive, and mount it, and point to it as /dev/fd0??

Kind of a loopback?

[maccorin]

Is there a way to make virtual floppy drive so that i can make a lilo boot floppy using that virtual floppy drive?

Let me explain...

We have this patched version of LILO that does booting with hardware configuration measurement and also several other measurement to TCGA compliant security chip during the bootup. (We changed first.S and second.S in the lilo source.) The fact of the matter is that we don't trust the reliability of this LILO and we decided not to mess with the MBR and instead we just made LILO boot floppy.

Why not? Have you run your patch across lilo's mailing list (do they have one?). I bet you could make it so that lilo still works on normal x86 setups, as well as what your working on, and get it included in the main lilo distro, this would provide you with the knowledge that lilo experts have taken a look at your code

Now several years have passed and computers don't ship with floppy disk drives anymore (especially laptops). I've seen ways to convert LILO boot floppy into bootable CD with the help of El Torito, but this does not work on systems that do not have floppy drive...cause you can't make the LILO boot floppy to begin with. I've tried building LILO boot floppy on another machine that has the same kernel image that i'm trying to boot off and then I tried to make bootable cd off that floppy disk image. But later I found that LILO is sort of machine specific so that the bootable CD doesn't really do the job.

interesting... I don't see any reason for this. In fact, don't most rescue cd's (slackwares comes to mind) use lilo to boot the machine? Of course I have little knowledge of lilo outside what a user needs to know.

<snip>

So what I need is the ability to write to a location in HD as if it was a floppy drive (some /dev/fd0 simulation) and then be able to create a boot image off that and make iso and burn it.

you should be able to make a small file, and then just "format" that file as a vfat filesystem

The simulation of floppy is what I'm wondering about the most. Is there any way to do this?

PS I looked into Live CDs but I don't know much how to tweak it so that it'll use my custom LILO to boot...