768171d7eb
Ancient (pre-2003) x86 kernels could boot from a floppy disk straight from the BIOS, using a small real mode boot stub at the start of the image where the BIOS would expect the boot record (or boot block) to appear. Due to its limitations (kernel size < 1 MiB, no support for IDE, USB or El Torito floppy emulation), this support was dropped, and a Linux aware bootloader is now always required to boot the kernel from a legacy BIOS. To smoothen this transition, the boot stub was not removed entirely, but replaced with one that just prints an error message telling the user to install a bootloader. As it is unlikely that anyone doing direct floppy boot with such an ancient kernel is going to upgrade to v6.5+ and expect that this boot method still works, printing this message is kind of pointless, and so it should be possible to remove the logic that emits it. Let's free up this space so it can be used to expand the PE header in a subsequent patch. Signed-off-by: Ard Biesheuvel <ardb@kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org> Acked-by: H. Peter Anvin (Intel) <hpa@zytor.com> Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20230912090051.4014114-21-ardb@google.com
Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.