On Wednesday 08 January 2003 9:37 pm, Alessio Sangalli wrote:
what about that disc on chip device: how much does it cost more or less?
In the UK they cost about GBP20 - so I guess that's about EUR30 / USD30 in the rest of the world...
Why can't we use a normal FLASH memory like the ones used to store a standard BIOS?
Because they do not have a large enough capacity. Standard BIOS chips are 2megabits (= 32 kilobytes), which is not neough to hold a Linux kernel.
I can think those chips provide particular features, but which ones exactly?
The main thing which DoC does which you can't do with standard Flash Roms is to format them as a Silicon Disc, and put a file system into them.
Aren't common flash/eeprom chips much easier to find and cheaper to buy?
Yes, but they're too small.
An external programmer could be needed (like for the eproms of etherboot) but most people could have access to such a device.
You can program a Flash Rom chip on your motherboard - no external programmer needed - that's how you upgrade the BIOS even if you're not doing anything with LinuxBIOS.
Antony.
--
If you want to be happy for an hour, get drunk. If you want to be happy for a year, get married. If you want to be happy for a lifetime, get a garden.
Antony Stone wrote:
In the UK they cost about GBP20 - so I guess that's about EUR30 / USD30 in the rest of the world...
Is there a web-seller or something?
Because they do not have a large enough capacity. Standard BIOS chips are 2megabits (= 32 kilobytes), which is not neough to hold a Linux kernel.
256KB perhaps?
And how many mbits are those disc-on-chip?
I can think those chips provide particular features, but which ones exactly?
The main thing which DoC does which you can't do with standard Flash Roms is to format them as a Silicon Disc, and put a file system into them.
So even if I have a flash big enough to store a complete kernel, I won't be able to use it with linuxbios? Only for diskless boxes perhaps? What if I do have an hard disk in the system?
Aren't common flash/eeprom chips much easier to find and cheaper to buy?
Yes, but they're too small.
I'm surprised, I though it was easy to find few megaBYTES flash chips nowadays. Isn't it possible to use my 8MB compact-flash card? ehhehe
You can program a Flash Rom chip on your motherboard - no external programmer needed - that's how you upgrade the BIOS even if you're not doing anything with LinuxBIOS.
yes, I know; however I thought that burning several megabits non standard flash chips could have required an external device or something. But it was only a supposition.
However, I must say the price of a DoC is quite high... very comparable to the cost of a pcchips motherboard, which I can find for as low as 45EUR... 30 (plus shipping!) for the DoC is much...
There is no other possible solution about this? I will have an IDE hard disk in the system... perhaps it's possible to have a working LB without a DoC?
bye, thank you as
On Wednesday 08 January 2003 10:46 pm, Alessio Sangalli wrote:
Antony Stone wrote:
Because they do not have a large enough capacity. Standard BIOS chips are 2megabits (= 32 kilobytes), which is not neough to hold a Linux kernel.
256KB perhaps?
Sorry - yes, 256kbytes is correct.
And how many mbits are those disc-on-chip?
The ones most people use (MD-2800-D08) are 8 megabytes.
So even if I have a flash big enough to store a complete kernel, I won't be able to use it with linuxbios? Only for diskless boxes perhaps? What if I do have an hard disk in the system?
If you have a flash chip big enough fro a kernel I don't think it'll fit into the normal 32 pin socket used by 2 mbit BIOS chips.
However, if you can get a kernel into a chip, then you can certainly have your root fs on a hard drive or across a network.
I'm surprised, I though it was easy to find few megaBYTES flash chips nowadays. Isn't it possible to use my 8MB compact-flash card? ehhehe
Yes, it is. You can get IDE to compact flash adapters, and this will let you boot your machine from CF without needing LinuxBIOS.
However, I must say the price of a DoC is quite high... very comparable to the cost of a pcchips motherboard, which I can find for as low as 45EUR... 30 (plus shipping!) for the DoC is much...
Please tell me where to get a PC-Chips motherboard for 45 Euro. I like the sound of this.
There is no other possible solution about this? I will have an IDE hard disk in the system... perhaps it's possible to have a working LB without a DoC?
You can get LinuxBIOS + etherboot into a 2 Mbit Flash chip if you can boot a kernel across the network.
Regards,
Antony.
Greetings,
For many mainboards, 256K is the limit due to not having all of the pins connected. 512 is a harder limit imposed by the 32 available pins on the flash chip. DoC gets around that by having page flipping built in (sort of like EMM from back in the 8088 days).
Newer chipsets and motherboards get around the address line limit using either LPC interface (a serialization of ISA into a much smaller pin count), or firmware hub (more or less Intel's take on LPC).
It is quite possible to get LinuxBIOS and a loader such as Etherboot into a conventional flash. From there the options for loading the kernel include network, IDE drive, or CF. A little work will allow floppy or CDROM.
G'day, sjames
On Wed, 8 Jan 2003, Antony Stone wrote:
On Wednesday 08 January 2003 10:46 pm, Alessio Sangalli wrote:
Antony Stone wrote:
Because they do not have a large enough capacity. Standard BIOS chips are 2megabits (= 32 kilobytes), which is not neough to hold a Linux kernel.
256KB perhaps?
Sorry - yes, 256kbytes is correct.
And how many mbits are those disc-on-chip?
The ones most people use (MD-2800-D08) are 8 megabytes.
So even if I have a flash big enough to store a complete kernel, I won't be able to use it with linuxbios? Only for diskless boxes perhaps? What if I do have an hard disk in the system?
If you have a flash chip big enough fro a kernel I don't think it'll fit into the normal 32 pin socket used by 2 mbit BIOS chips.
However, if you can get a kernel into a chip, then you can certainly have your root fs on a hard drive or across a network.
I'm surprised, I though it was easy to find few megaBYTES flash chips nowadays. Isn't it possible to use my 8MB compact-flash card? ehhehe
Yes, it is. You can get IDE to compact flash adapters, and this will let you boot your machine from CF without needing LinuxBIOS.
However, I must say the price of a DoC is quite high... very comparable to the cost of a pcchips motherboard, which I can find for as low as 45EUR... 30 (plus shipping!) for the DoC is much...
Please tell me where to get a PC-Chips motherboard for 45 Euro. I like the sound of this.
There is no other possible solution about this? I will have an IDE hard disk in the system... perhaps it's possible to have a working LB without a DoC?
You can get LinuxBIOS + etherboot into a 2 Mbit Flash chip if you can boot a kernel across the network.
Regards,
Antony.
steven james pyro@linuxlabs.com writes:
Greetings,
For many mainboards, 256K is the limit due to not having all of the pins connected. 512 is a harder limit imposed by the 32 available pins on the flash chip. DoC gets around that by having page flipping built in (sort of like EMM from back in the 8088 days).
Newer chipsets and motherboards get around the address line limit using either LPC interface (a serialization of ISA into a much smaller pin count), or firmware hub (more or less Intel's take on LPC).
Currently in the LPC/firmware hub form factor I have seen chips as large as 8mbit == 1MByte. And theoretical limit is something like 4GB. So as larger flash chips become available we can use them.
It is quite possible to get LinuxBIOS and a loader such as Etherboot into a conventional flash. From there the options for loading the kernel include network, IDE drive, or CF. A little work will allow floppy or CDROM.
Actually there is already a floppy driver in etherboot, though it could probably use some stabilizing. Only a CDROM drive requires some real work.
Eric
On Wed, 8 Jan 2003 23:54:14 +0000, Antony Stone wrote:
If you have a flash chip big enough fro a kernel I don't think it'll fit into the normal 32 pin socket used by 2 mbit BIOS chips.
A 29F040b is a 4 m-bit (512k) part and is a std jdec 32 pin pacakge. I have managed to get a bios (commercial) + kernel in that. No root disk though. Had to use a 2nd chip for that. (It was a custom board)
The real issue is for commercial MBs is if they brought all the address lines out to the chip.
-- Richard A. Smith Bitworks, Inc. rsmith@bitworks.com 479.846.5777 x104 Sr. Design Engineer http://www.bitworks.com
On Thursday 09 January 2003 4:43 pm, Richard A. Smith wrote:
On Wed, 8 Jan 2003 23:54:14 +0000, Antony Stone wrote:
If you have a flash chip big enough fro a kernel I don't think it'll fit into the normal 32 pin socket used by 2 mbit BIOS chips.
A 29F040b is a 4 m-bit (512k) part and is a std jdec 32 pin pacakge. I have managed to get a bios (commercial) + kernel in that. No root disk though. Had to use a 2nd chip for that. (It was a custom board)
How did you get a kernel into <512kbytes? What version did you start from?
Antony.
Antony Stone Antony@Soft-Solutions.co.uk writes:
On Thursday 09 January 2003 4:43 pm, Richard A. Smith wrote:
On Wed, 8 Jan 2003 23:54:14 +0000, Antony Stone wrote:
If you have a flash chip big enough fro a kernel I don't think it'll fit into the normal 32 pin socket used by 2 mbit BIOS chips.
A 29F040b is a 4 m-bit (512k) part and is a std jdec 32 pin pacakge. I have managed to get a bios (commercial) + kernel in that. No root disk though. Had to use a 2nd chip for that. (It was a custom board)
How did you get a kernel into <512kbytes? What version did you start from?
It is not to terribly hard to get a minimal 2.4.x kernel into 360KB or so.
Eric
On Thu, 9 Jan 2003 17:13:27 +0000, Antony Stone wrote:
On Thursday 09 January 2003 4:43 pm, Richard A. Smith wrote:
On Wed, 8 Jan 2003 23:54:14 +0000, Antony Stone wrote:
If you have a flash chip big enough fro a kernel I don't think it'll fit into the normal 32 pin socket used by 2 mbit BIOS chips.
A 29F040b is a 4 m-bit (512k) part and is a std jdec 32 pin pacakge. I have managed to get a bios (commercial) + kernel in that. No root disk though. Had to use a 2nd chip for that. (It was a custom board)
How did you get a kernel into <512kbytes? What version did you start from?
2.4.2. You just have to turn off everything but the essentials. Works out to 480k or so.
-- Richard A. Smith Bitworks, Inc. rsmith@bitworks.com 479.846.5777 x104 Sr. Design Engineer http://www.bitworks.com
On Thu, 9 Jan 2003, Richard A. Smith wrote:
2.4.2. You just have to turn off everything but the essentials. Works out to 480k or so.
I'd like to see that on 2.4.19 ...
ron
On Wed, 8 Jan 2003, Alessio Sangalli wrote:
Antony Stone wrote:
In the UK they cost about GBP20 - so I guess that's about EUR30 / USD30 in the rest of the world...
Is there a web-seller or something?
if you are a beginner and somewhat confused ... go to cwlinux.com and buy a pc chips 810 board which will come with DoC installed AND an SDK.
I have some of these and they work well.
ron
Ronald G. Minnich wrote:
if you are a beginner and somewhat confused ... go to cwlinux.com and buy a pc chips 810 board which will come with DoC installed AND an SDK.
ok, I see there is a kit:
Localdisk version features
* 1 x LinuxBIOS compatiable mainboard (Intel/AMD based) * 1 x FlashRom with LinuxBIOS which is configured to boot from hda1 * 1 x BIOS Savior for bios selection * Sample ELF kernel images
(the bios savior thing is cool eheh)
I think to understand that a DoC is not required if I have a local disk in my system; I can put linuxbios and no other software on a normal bios-like flash (2mbit should be enough) then load a kernel and operate on a file system on my hard disk (which could even be a CF card, inserted in the proper cd-to-ide adapter)...
The point is that I want linuxbios to powerup my living-room computer in the shortest possible time: it is a satellite digital videorecorder (and it has a big hard disk for this reason) which by now takes far too much time to powerup (43seconds, many taken by the BIOS). How much time should I expect for a 'local disk' init 1 linuxbios boot?
bye, thank you as
The point is that I want linuxbios to powerup my living-room computer in the shortest possible time: it is a satellite digital videorecorder (and it has a big hard disk for this reason) which by now takes far too much time to powerup (43seconds, many taken by the BIOS). How much time should I expect for a 'local disk' init 1 linuxbios boot?
It takes about 1 sec from power up to loading kernel from localdisk. With CF card, you don't even worry about harddisk spin-up. To speed up everything, you can even remove ide driver which takes about couple sec to load, from the kernel. Then, mount your rootfs as ramdisk. It can be done by mkelfImage. However, you can't modify any data with this config. I guess it is ok for vdr.
-Andrew
On Wed, 8 Jan 2003, Antony Stone wrote:
Because they do not have a large enough capacity. Standard BIOS chips are 2megabits (= 32 kilobytes), which is not neough to hold a Linux kernel.
no 2 megabits is 256 kbytes. Still not enough for a kernel. Plenty for etherboot however.
You can program a Flash Rom chip on your motherboard - no external programmer needed - that's how you upgrade the BIOS even if you're not doing anything with LinuxBIOS.
my flash programmer has been on a shelf for two years now.
ron
On Wed, 8 Jan 2003 17:51:16 -0700 (MST) "Ronald G. Minnich" rminnich@lanl.gov wrote:
no 2 megabits is 256 kbytes. Still not enough for a kernel. Plenty for
etherboot however.
I bet its /possible/ to get a kernel into there...
On Thu, 9 Jan 2003, Ian Molton wrote:
no 2 megabits is 256 kbytes. Still not enough for a kernel. Plenty for
etherboot however.
I bet its /possible/ to get a kernel into there...
I'll believe it when I see it, many have tried but all have failed :-)
ron
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Alessio Sangalli -
Andrew Ip -
Antony Stone -
ebiederman＠lnxi.com -
Ian Molton -
Richard A. Smith -
Ronald G. Minnich -
steven james