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mknbi 1.4.3-2
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mknbi.pl 1.4.3

mknbi is a utility for building a tagged image for a kernel for various
operating systems. It can also build a tagged images for an Etherboot ROM
image and an external menu program, which aren't really operating systems.

mknbi has several advantages over the mknbi tools in netboot-0.8.1
and contrib:

It is more portable, as it is written in Perl. It should be possible to
execute the Perl script unchanged on various platforms to which Perl5
has been ported. January 2001: I have since received word of one person
uring mknbi on an WinNT system with only a couple of changes.

It will be able to cope with any additional load formats that Etherboot
might support in future, because the image format specific handling has
been abstracted into a class, Nbi.pm. As of January 2001, there is a new
class for handling ELF format, Elf.pm.

It is more readable. While this is a matter of opinion, my personal
perspective is that Perl is more concise than C, and this aids
comprehension because one can keep more context with the limited number
of lines on the screen. Perl's powerful builtin functions and useful
data types handle situations such as structure extraction and packing,
and byte ordering simply. It is relatively easy to add support for new
features. The drawback is that the programmer must be fluent in Perl.