On Mon, 9 Nov 1998 daniel.engstrom@riksnett.no wrote:
Hello!
The last few weeks I have been experimenting with some boot up code, and I though some one might want to look at and/or play with it.
It can boot, enter protected mode uncompress the main firmware and jump to it. I currently work on some RAM detection testing routines.
my current stuff (as of before the weekend) can be downloaded from http://www.lillfab.se/gfw-0.1.tar.gz
/Daniel
Hey,
I've looked some at your code, and seems pretty nice for a basic framework. At least its better than nothing and I strongly believe that if we ever plan to get this thing on the road we have to start writing some code. Maybe (hopefully) there are more out there who have written something so maybe we should try to agree on some of the basic framework and then start out in a small scale. Anyhow that's my thoughts thus far, flame me if you like ;).
As I see it there is a _tiny_ problem for people without access to the proper electronic devices (e.g. EPROM programmers), like me. So I've started out with Daniel's code as a base trying to write a simple floppy loader that will work like this: First we let the normal BIOS bootstrap us, then we load our ROM image into memory someplace nice. After that we have to get rid of the old BIOS in some nice way ;). Here's where I sense potentional problems. Cleaning the interrupt table and resetting the PICs and stuff will probably work pretty well, but what if the BIOS already initialized other devices? Comments are welcome!!
Bertil bertil@k2.lund.se