MS-DOS Boot Program for Plan 9

The program is written by myself and Russ Cox.

Boot performs the same job as b.com, but is an MS-DOS .exe, allowing the kernel and plan9.ini to be loaded from any filesystem accessible by MS-DOS. In addition, the Packet Driver Specification is supported, allowing booting over networks.

The current version is 1.1, and is the first, so please by gentle with it. It can be downloaded here.

How to use

It functions very similarly to b.com, so the manual page is a good place to start. To avoid confusion, the boot methods used are distinct. They are:

dos

Boot from a file in an MS-DOS file system. The syntax is

dos!filespec.

p

Boot via a network using a Packet Driver. The syntax is more flexible here:

p!device[!servername[:filename]]

where device may be either an interface number, or a Packet Driver interrupt, servername is the BOOTP server name, and filename is the file on the server containing the required kernel image.

d

Boot from a Plan 9 partition, using the INT 0x13 interface. The syntax is

d!disk

where disk is the disk number.

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