Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 1021
loadlin clearing memory?
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:49 EDT
The component should be "loadlin" which is not in the list. I have a locally-written program which needs to access the BIOS image by reading /dev/mem. It works properly when I boot Linux using LILO, but if I boot using Loadlin the pertinent part of /dev/mem seems to be all zero. The distribution does not appear to include the Loadlin source code, so I have not yet been able to investigate further. Red Hat 5.1, kernel 2.0.35-1, loadlin v1.6
The source code for loadlin.exe is located also in the dosutils directory of our cdrom as lodlin16.tgz. It is unfortunately in assembly.
OK, found it. I'd suggest packaging it as a source rpm, the way the lilo source is packaged. Getting back to the underlying issue, I've been in contact with the author of Loadlin and it seems unlikely that this can be fixed easily due to the complexity of Loadlin having to coexist with things like himem.sys and emm386.sys; also I was probably just lucky that the BIOS image was preserved when I booted using LILO.
Discarding as it is not a package that we maintain inhouse. Requests for loadlin should go through the package maintainer.