On Wed, 26 Jan 2005, Richard Smith wrote:
I don't see any reason that ADLO sould not be able to boot FreeDOS. ADLO is a deriative of the bios from the bochs project so if you can get bochs to boot FreeDOS or MSDOS then the same should be possible under ADLO.
starting with FreeDOS is probably a good idea since it will be easier to figure out what the problems are. You could compile FreeDOS with debugging, or something like that so you know why it is failing. etc.
(be sure to be fixing bochs bios, not FreeDOS).
At one point I tried to sync up ADLO with the current version of the bochs bios but it would not boot. The IDE routines in ADLO seem to be more correct than the stock stuff in bochs.
or perhaps to put it other way around; 95% of current problems with BOCHS bios is related to the ide driver. Get IDE driver right and it is quite possible most of the stuff will work.
if anyone cares here's current change log for bios from the bochs project.
http://bochs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/topper.pl?name=Project+Page&url=htt...
ADLO is currently only in V1 but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work in V2 as well. Its just a payload. One thing about ADLO is that the loader has to be customized to the chipset. The loader has to enable the shadow ram section and copy itself into that range. Since there is no mechanism to do this across payloads you have to do it explicitly in the loader.