Understanding intcall in linux kernel

[onlyonemac]

So the code you are looking at here is only really there for an edge case, and is not the start-up used by Linux on most systems today. The x86/boot directory, with all the 16-bit startup code, is basically Linux's appendix, important at one time but now sort of just hanging around there in a reduced form because there's no reason to eliminate it even though it isn't really needed anymore.

So that means that we cannot build a minimal boot environment using that code?

If I'm understanding this correctly, you can, but it will be based on legacy code which you should probably avoid.