Well, I finally got my final, cleaned-up version of the PXE boot loader for FreeBSD tested. With that out of the way, I committed all my current patches to the boot loader, cleaning up some things, and adding PXE support. Next up on the todo list for the loader is to add support in the BTX environment for hooking hardware interrupts. Client apps will register an ISR that I call at PL3 like the rest of the application. This way the ISR can be written in C and use the same vm86 entry points as the rest of the loader. I also have another set of patches to look at to detect the int 13 EDD extensions and turn on LBA support automatically in the loader. I plan on merging similar functionality into the other stages of the boot process so that LBA support will no longer have to be manually enabled after installation.

In other news, my latest USB-install release is broken due to silliness on my part. The end result is a kernel that has no console device and thus can't perform any I/O when it tries to boot. Now that I have tracked this silly typo down, I am waiting for the recent world breakge to be fixed so that I can roll another test release. Thankfully, almost all of my changes to enable USB support in the installation floppies can be merged easily into the main installation floppies. However, USB keyboards do not work with the kernel's userconfig utility. Thus, the INSTRO_USERCONFIG option cannot be compiled into the USB boot floppy's kernel. As a result, it looks like we will have to have a seperate kern.flp image for systems with USB keyboards until userconfig can be moved out of the kernel and into the loader.

47 days to graduation now; I can't wait.