OpenBIOS March 1998

openbios@openbios.org

15 participants
23 discussions

Re: Did someone start?
by David Woodhouse 12 Mar '98

12 Mar '98

pavel(a)elf.ucw.cz said: > Hmm. Did someone _really_ start? Is there someone who actually > compiled that Bochs BIOS? Where to download complete package > (including bcc, because it is not really common). I'm not sure about _compiling_ the Bochs BIOS, but Dave Cinege tried the precompiled version that comes with the Bochs source, and it did nothing visibly useful. Bcc is part of the Dev86 package, which can be found at http://poboxes.com/rdebath I'll put a copy of the latest version in /pub/openbios on my machine, too. As for _really_ starting on the code, I doubt that anyone's made much of a start. I'm itching to do some, but my Director of Studies will slaughter me if I so much as look at anything but "An implementation of RSVP on Nemesis" ( http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/pegasus/nemesis.html ) ---- ---- ---- David Woodhouse, Robinson College, CB3 9AN, England. (+44) 0976 658355 Dave(a)imladris.demon.co.uk http://dwmw2.robinson.cam.ac.uk finger pgp(a)dwmw2.robinson.cam.ac.uk for PGP key. --- OpenBIOS -- http://www.linkscape.net/openbios/ openbios-request(a)linkscape.net Body: un/subscribe Problems? dcinege(a)psychosis.com

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Re: [OpenBIOS] Hello World
by Pascal Dornier 11 Mar '98

11 Mar '98

>The MDA cards require absolutely no setup. They display text from the moment >the power goes on. I suspect older [CEV]GA cards will be similar. Not correct, you need to initialize the 6845 CRTC. Pardon the grotty formatting. ; ; Init Hercules card ; cld mov al,#$21 ;disable video mov dx,#$03b8 out dx,al mov si,#herctext ;set text mode mov bl,#0 mov dx,#$03b4 hercloop mov al,bl out dx,al inc dx cs: lods.b out dx,al dec dx inc bx cmp bl,#16 jb hercloop mov al,#$29 ;enable video mov dx,#$3b8 out dx,al mov ax,#$b000 ;clear screen mov es,ax mov ax,#vidfill mov cx,#2000 mov di,#0 rep stos jmp hercend ; ; Hercules text mode settings ; herctext B $61,$50,$52,$0F,$19,$06,$19,$19 ; mode 7 B $02,$0D,$0B,$0C,$00,$00,$00,$00 hercend --- OpenBIOS -- http://www.linkscape.net/openbios/ openbios-request(a)linkscape.net Body: un/subscribe Problems? dcinege(a)psychosis.com

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Re: [OpenBIOS] Hello World
by David Woodhouse 11 Mar '98

11 Mar '98

> > Ditch your fancy new SVGA cards, install an old MDA card, and > > mov ax,b800h > > mov ds,ax > > ... > > IIRC, the segment base for MDA is 0xb000, not 0xb800 (CGA), but, as > with you, it's been a while. I stand corrected. I hereby declare myself to be this week's Official Mr. F^&* All Good, for failing even to manage a six-line asm program <D:-( ---- ---- ---- David Woodhouse, Robinson College, CB3 9AN, England. (+44) 0976 658355 Dave(a)imladris.demon.co.uk http://dwmw2.robinson.cam.ac.uk finger pgp(a)dwmw2.robinson.cam.ac.uk for PGP key. --- OpenBIOS -- http://www.linkscape.net/openbios/ openbios-request(a)linkscape.net Body: un/subscribe Problems? dcinege(a)psychosis.com

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Re: [OpenBIOS] Hello World
by David Woodhouse 11 Mar '98

11 Mar '98

oxymoron(a)waste.org said: > It would be nearly as easy to generate output on the serial port > using polled IO. Presumably all the developers have at least a serial > port and a second machine that they're not ready to kill their BIOS > on. I've recently written a small library of assembly functions to do > this, include register and memory dump routines and a printf-like > varargs function for debugging the bootloader of an embedded > operating system I'm writing. The routines are currently written for > MASM - if anyone would like them, I can make them available. Sounds good. Could you mail them to me, and I'll put them up for FTP with the rest of the stuff. Support for reblowing the flash from a serial port, rather than from a floppy, is going to be a damn sight easier to put together, so I suggest that we do that in the first instance, too. ---- ---- ---- David Woodhouse, Robinson College, CB3 9AN, England. (+44) 0976 658355 Dave(a)imladris.demon.co.uk http://dwmw2.robinson.cam.ac.uk finger pgp(a)dwmw2.robinson.cam.ac.uk for PGP key. --- OpenBIOS -- http://www.linkscape.net/openbios/ openbios-request(a)linkscape.net Body: un/subscribe Problems? dcinege(a)psychosis.com

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Re: [OpenBIOS] Is this list still alive?
by David Woodhouse 11 Mar '98

11 Mar '98

> It's alive. I signed up recently trying to find out if I can help. Get an > idea of the level of development. But like you said there has been no > traffic (I even forgot I signed up). > > Who can I contact to find out if I can do some work on the OpenBIOS? I think the discussions of general ideas fizzled out, and the last we heard, people were off to play with the Bochs BIOS source, in an attempt to get it to work at least a little bit on a real computer. Until then, we can still put together a development system, binary module spec., and a list of modules to be provided. At some point in the dim and distant past, I and a few other people posted lists of the basic support that we're going to require in order to boot a Linux kernel. Unless you have access to the necessary hardware for making replacement PROMS, assume that someone will get the basic chipset init working, pick something else, and implement it. INT 15h extended memory services might be a simple place to start, and should be quite simple to test from DOS. ---- ---- ---- David Woodhouse, Robinson College, CB3 9AN, England. (+44) 0976 658355 Dave(a)imladris.demon.co.uk http://dwmw2.robinson.cam.ac.uk finger pgp(a)dwmw2.robinson.cam.ac.uk for PGP key. --- OpenBIOS -- http://www.linkscape.net/openbios/ openbios-request(a)linkscape.net Body: un/subscribe Problems? dcinege(a)psychosis.com

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Re: [OpenBIOS] Hello World
by David Woodhouse 11 Mar '98

11 Mar '98

cpa(a)hopper.unh.edu said: > What would it take just to write a Hello World program? Ditch your fancy new SVGA cards, install an old MDA card, and mov ax,b800h mov ds,ax mov ax,'eH' mov [0],ax mov ax,'ll' mov [2],ax ... OK, I'm a bit rusty, but you get the idea. The MDA cards require absolutely no setup. They display text from the moment the power goes on. I suspect older [CEV]GA cards will be similar. > I think > seeing this code would give people something of a starting place. Do > we just load the Video BIOS up and use it to write a string to the > screen and halt, or can/should we do it without the Video BIOS? Until we've set up enough to support the card's Video BIOS, we'd better do it on our own. Most new cards will probably require at least the PCI BIOS functions to have been implemented first. > From there you can add support to initialize your chipsets functions. > BTW, do we have anybody here with a SMP machine? Those do require more > to initialize, and we will eventually want to make sure that works. Yep. I've got such a beast. I'm not playing until May, when my Finals are over, but after that I'll be working on it. You'd be surprised at just how little the SMP Tyan BIOS manages to do for itself - that's half the reason I wanted us to write our own in the first place. ---- ---- ---- David Woodhouse, Robinson College, CB3 9AN, England. (+44) 0976 658355 Dave(a)imladris.demon.co.uk http://dwmw2.robinson.cam.ac.uk finger pgp(a)dwmw2.robinson.cam.ac.uk for PGP key. --- OpenBIOS -- http://www.linkscape.net/openbios/ openbios-request(a)linkscape.net Body: un/subscribe Problems? dcinege(a)psychosis.com

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Hello World
by Chris Arguin 11 Mar '98

11 Mar '98

Since everybody is wondering if the list is alive, I'll post something I've been thinking about... What would it take just to write a Hello World program? I think seeing this code would give people something of a starting place. Do we just load the Video BIOS up and use it to write a string to the screen and halt, or can/should we do it without the Video BIOS? >From there you can add support to initialize your chipsets functions. BTW, do we have anybody here with a SMP machine? Those do require more to initialize, and we will eventually want to make sure that works. -- Chris Arguin | "...All we had were Zeros and Ones -- And Chris.Arguin(a)unh.edu | sometimes we didn't even have Ones." +--------------+ - Dilbert, by Scott Adams http://leonardo.sr.unh.edu/arguin/home.html | --- OpenBIOS -- http://www.linkscape.net/openbios/ openbios-request(a)linkscape.net Body: un/subscribe Problems? dcinege(a)psychosis.com

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Re: [OpenBIOS] Hello World
by Ben Pfaff 11 Mar '98

11 Mar '98

cpa(a)hopper.unh.edu said: > What would it take just to write a Hello World program? Ditch your fancy new SVGA cards, install an old MDA card, and mov ax,b800h mov ds,ax mov ax,'eH' mov [0],ax mov ax,'ll' mov [2],ax ... OK, I'm a bit rusty, but you get the idea. IIRC, the segment base for MDA is 0xb000, not 0xb800 (CGA), but, as with you, it's been a while. --- OpenBIOS -- http://www.linkscape.net/openbios/ openbios-request(a)linkscape.net Body: un/subscribe Problems? dcinege(a)psychosis.com

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Re: [OpenBIOS] Is this list still alive?
by David Woodhouse 11 Mar '98

11 Mar '98

danh(a)firstwest.com said: > Am I able to use C, or is this strictly asm? Of course some asm will > be involved but C makes the development faster. Do what you like. I don't think it's particularly reasonable to expect the whole thing to be written in asm. Also, I reckon that just about any compiler can generate better asm than I can. steve(a)icarus.icarus.com said: > Doing without a compiler only makes sense for writing a few tricky > functions or impressing women. I'm inclined to agree. Glance at http://dwmw2.robinson.cam.ac.uk/devload/ for evidence to back this up. It was fun, but I wouldn't want to do it again. ---- ---- ---- David Woodhouse, Robinson College, CB3 9AN, England. (+44) 0976 658355 Dave(a)imladris.demon.co.uk http://dwmw2.robinson.cam.ac.uk finger pgp(a)dwmw2.robinson.cam.ac.uk for PGP key. --- OpenBIOS -- http://www.linkscape.net/openbios/ openbios-request(a)linkscape.net Body: un/subscribe Problems? dcinege(a)psychosis.com

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Introduction
by Jim Stewart 04 Mar '98

04 Mar '98

Hello all, I've been lurking on the mailing list for about a week now and I'd like to say hi. I have an interest in Bios code because I've written the Bios for our Flashlite series of controllers and I'm interested in building an embedded Linux machine. As far as contributions go, I can't give you my code, but I do have the source to a PC/XT Bios, written in Masm, that was freely circulated a few years ago. It does work, I've burned it into eproms and booted from it and I've used just a little code from it. It's not very pretty, but if there is any demand, I'll post it for downloading. Concerning Microsoft OS's and Bios, at least in the case of Win95, I have it on pretty good authority that the OS uses *none* of the Bios functions. This is documented in "Unauthorized Windows 95" and confirmed by the VP of engineering at Award Software. What I got from my discussions with him is that the current microsoft philosophy is for the Bios to initialize the hardware and sorta give the os clues as to what's out there and nothing more. Whether this is relevent to your efforts is not real clear yet as I haven't been on the list very long. In any case, I'll be lurking, and if I can be of any help, let me know. Regards, Jim --- OpenBIOS -- http://www.linkscape.net/openbios/ openbios-request(a)linkscape.net Body: un/subscribe Problems? dcinege(a)psychosis.com

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