[coreboot] Could RedoxOS fit on a 1.44MB or 2.88MB floppy?

@jackpot51 , I saw your coreboot tweet! :wink: It is already possible to add any floppy OS to coreboot BIOS build with one simple command:

./build/cbfstool ./build/coreboot.rom add -f ./yourfloppy.img -n floppyimg/nameinsidecbfs.lzma -t raw -c lzma

and then you see it as a boot entry! Multiple floppies could be added this way (as long as you have enough space left inside the BIOS flash chip, luckily LZMA compression could be used for the stored floppies to reduce their occupied size) - so you could have multiple OS inside coreboot at the same time.

My laptopā€™s BIOS chip is a standard 4MB and fat proprietary UEFI occupied almost all this space, but coreboot takes less than 1MB so it is possible to add 2.88MB ā€œEDā€ floppy there even if it is quite information dense and almost the same size while compressed (like KolibriOS which goes from 1.44MB to 1.2MB)

I already tested this approach with the following floppy-based OS : KolibriOS - nice x86 assembly OS with GUI, lots of cool apps and even networking - all in 1.44MB ! http://kolibrios.org/en/ , FreeDOS and many others ; full list of the floppies that we found useful is available at http://dangerousprototypes.com/docs/Lenovo_G505S_hacking#Useful_floppies

So, could RedoxOS fit on a 1.44MB or 2.88MB floppy?

IDK for sure, but when I did a fresh build of the git repo it create a harddrive.bin file thatā€™s 268 Mb, if that help at all.

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@BearzRobotics , thank you very much for your reply! Yes, it seems that the RedoxOS size is too large for it to be fit inside a BIOS chip - because they are much smaller than 268 MB of courseā€¦ :thinking: But then I donā€™t understand @jackpot51 desire to bring RedoxOS to coreboot. Maybe he wanted to bring only a kernel (+ maybe a small ā€œinitrdā€-like part) there? Will be interesting to get any reply from him to clarify his wishes :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: