Sorry if I am repeating myself here. I am re-posting this to the list because I am not sure it made it out there the first time I posted it. It seems that there was not much activity here for a few weeks. I am not sure if the list was down or everyone was just too busy with real life :)
I am thinking about trying to flesh out some of my BIOS/BootProm ideas. I would like to do so in C using Micro$ofts Visual Studio (mainly because I have it and am familiar with it).
Can M$-VC 5.0 (or M$-VC 6.0) be used to develop PROM based x86 code?
I have been told that it can. Something about setting some switches in the compiler. But I need to know more about _how_ it is done. There are lots of details that I need to know about. Like setting program/data address origins, creating the binary file and converting it to HEX or another format that can be burned into PROM.
If you have experience doing embedded or BIOS work on x86 systems using the Micro$oft development environment I would really appreciate some pointers.
TIA, Dave
On Sun, 7 Mar 1999, Dave wrote:
I am thinking about trying to flesh out some of my BIOS/BootProm ideas. I would like to do so in C using Micro$ofts Visual Studio (mainly because I have it and am familiar with it).
Can M$-VC 5.0 (or M$-VC 6.0) be used to develop PROM based x86 code?
Currently I'd say it can't. The Makefiles are quite Unix/GNU specific. You need gcc and nasm installed on a Linux/Unix box to compile the sources.
I have been told that it can. Something about setting some switches in the compiler. But I need to know more about _how_ it is done. There are lots of details that I need to know about. Like setting program/data address origins, creating the binary file and converting it to HEX or another format that can be burned into PROM.
Theoretically I think it's possible. I don't have a VC licence nor VC installed on any of my boxes, so I can't tell you how to do this. If anyone is willing to fiddle around with this, it would of course be nice. Is VC producing better code than i.e. egcs or gcc?
If you have experience doing embedded or BIOS work on x86 systems using the Micro$oft development environment I would really appreciate some pointers.
Until now, we used a Linux development environment because it's really cheap.. I think we could try to go both ways simultaneously, though.
Regards, Stefan
Stefan Reinauer wrote:
Can M$-VC 5.0 (or M$-VC 6.0) be used to develop PROM based x86 code?
Currently I'd say it can't. The Makefiles are quite Unix/GNU specific. You need gcc and nasm installed on a Linux/Unix box to compile the sources.
You could probably get everything going under win32, with Cygnus Cygwin, or Mingw32, if you were really masochistic, you might even be able to get it driven by devstudio ;-).
http://agnes.dida.physik.uni-essen.de/~janjaap/mingw32/index.html http://sourceware.cygnus.com/cygwin/
Tim.
On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, Tim Small wrote:
You could probably get everything going under win32, with Cygnus Cygwin, or Mingw32, if you were really masochistic, you might even be able to get it driven by devstudio ;-).
http://agnes.dida.physik.uni-essen.de/~janjaap/mingw32/index.html http://sourceware.cygnus.com/cygwin/
This might help to get development on a window system started. But it's very likely the same code that comes out at last. It would be more interesting to know if the VC code is actually better than the gcc code.
I don't think it's a good idea to do development under windows since at least the first releases of OpenBIOS are not and won't be able to boot a windows system. But that's of course only my personal opinion...
Regards, Stefan Reinauer.
Stefan Reinauer wrote:
This might help to get development on a window system started. But it's very likely the same code that comes out at last. It would be more interesting to know if the VC code is actually better than the gcc code.
I've tested this here at work, Cygwin is MUCH better than VC, however, there might be some mucking around you can do with VC to get good code, though somehow I doubt it. Anybody who wants to work on OpenBIOS in Windows will have a much easier time with Cygwin.
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Dave -
James Oakley -
Stefan Reinauer -
Tim Small