Branden Waldner wrote:
I purchased a diskonchip 2000 266mb a while ago just to mess around with.
..
In the first place, I think my assumption of it exposing a large rom was wrong, it looks like they only actually only expose a small amount as regular bios boot rom space. While that sounds annoying, it would probably still be workable though.
On hardware level the device exposes only a window of its full capacity at a time. The electrical interface which it plugs into only has a limited address space. Software must have not only a driver for the device which knows how to move the window around but also an abstraction layer for memory access so that the driver can move the window at the correct time.
This is not in place for current coreboot boards.
Going by the "HOWTO" documentation in the coreboot_v1 branch I figured I could just hotswap it and load the diskonchip kernel module,
Good thinking, I believe this ought to work as long as the driver supports your device.
but I can't find any information about whether that actually supports the diskonchip 2000 or has been tested recently.
Also good thinking - please be aware that DiskOnChip and DiskOnChip 2000 are different products which are *not* compatible.
I tried the dos utils on freedos as well and couldn't get them to detect it either.
If that doesn't work, nothing else will.
I'm hoping that somebody still remembers a bit about them and maybe knows something about how I can get the chip working, confirm that it's not working, or just tell me I'm doing it wrong.
You're not doing it wrong, perhaps you need to look for more/other drivers and DOS utilities, perhaps the device is broken.
In the end, the experience in the coreboot community with these devices suggested to me that they are not actually worthwhile.
The requirement for two kinds of explicit software support with one being a fundamental abstraction of memory access make them difficult and very annoying to work with. Really only an option for completely custom systems.
I'm also hoping that it's not too off topic.
Don't worry, not at all.
In another mail I asked you where you're located but didn't notice a reply. Are you in the US? I've been thinking about your P2B situation and maybe I can help you out there.
//Peter