Charles Esson wrote:
Are you writing it in FORTH or C?
If writing in FORTH, at the moment I am working on a FORTH TCP stack and OS for the COLDFORTH which will be released under the GPL in February. The stack may be of use ( a bios should be able to boot off the net).
If I can be of any assistance let me know. This is the way a BIOS should be written. I also agree with your design comments. Hack and go it a good way to get the needed background to design you application, nothing more.
Regards Charles Esson
Niklas Ekström wrote:
I just though I should mention that I am, and has been for a while, programming an OpenFirmware compliant bios. The code is not available yet, but will be when it's finnished. I'm aiming to implement all three major OF interfaces (device, user, client). So far I have done the devicetree and the FCode evaluator. Untill I release the code I don't know how this could benefit anyone else, but atleast now you know that someone else is also working on this.
Since I'm not working on OpenBIOS I guess I shouldn't comment on how it should be done. But as a general though about programming (and possible all intellectual work at all), my opinion is that you should first make a strategy and write a design, and first after that start to do the actual work (code). When solving a physics problem you don't start by doing experiments and first after that find out what the experiments was good for, if at all (atleast that's not the way you _should_ do it! ;). From the above you can probably guess what I think about the "hack-and-go" approach I've seen mentioned here at times.
/ Niklas
On Mon, 24 Jan 2000, Bob Dobbs wrote:
Also important is an OpenFirmware interface because we should migrate away from x86 real mode interupt system. OpenFirmware would give us a clean, standard way for boot loaders or OS's to talk to the hardware. It would give us a configuration interface (albeit not too simple). And we could include a couple (or one or three) bootloader packages, e.g. linux_boot, multi_boot, chain_boot.
-graham
A FORTH TCP stack .. very interesting. Charles I don't remember what is COLDFORTH and I am not able to find references about COLDFORTH on the net. Is it a Forth-based board (stack processor)?
However, there is an ongoing Forth OS project released under the GPL, currently based on Intel x86 architecture, with which it would be possible exchange ideas and code (Forth and Assembly); an exchange beneficial, I think, for OpenBIOS also. It's "Retro/Forth OS" project:
Charles and Niklas are there URLs for your projects? Niklas what's the license of your BIOS?