could Nightingale OS fit on a floppy? about nightingale HOT 5 CLOSED

It's a good question! I believe it should be possible, after stripping all binaries the complete distribution I ship today fits in less than 1MB. The kernel is ~120k stripped, and the init filesystem is ~800k with all binaries stripped.

I imagine the biggest challenge will be the boot protocol, I currently only support multiboot2. I don't currently have plans to support anything else, but I'd be happy to take a look at what would be needed if you can point me to the relevant documentation.

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@tyler569 Is this "multiboot2" boot protocol compatible with the floppy images? If you could create a floppy that will be bootable in QEMU (which also uses a coreboot+SeaBIOS internally) or VirtualBox, no extra adjustments needed to try to launch it on the real hardware from this BIOS. I'll be happy to test ;)

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Multiboot 2 is how the OS learns about things like memory maps, ACPI information, the display, etc. I don't boot directly off BIOS, I use grub2 to collect that information for me because it's a lot more convenient than doing all of the BIOS initialization manually. I don't believe grub2 can fit on a floppy, it has a lot of functionality and is probably much larger than my OS, but if you know of another multiboot2-compatible bootloader that you would recommend I can give it a try.

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@tyler569 Interesting to know if there's a good reason for using GRUB2 and not GRUB 0.97 like https://github.com/mikaku/Fiwix/

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I rely on features of GRUB2 that are not present in legacy GRUB 0.97, including multiboot 2 support.

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