Project split. (Let's get working)

[Dave Cinege]

OK, enough screwing around.

My proposal:

Split the project into 2 working areas...
BIOS
Boot loader

The boot loader team can start coding NOW. First we make a stage1
loader that fits in the MBR that jumps to our real-mode proggie loaded somewhere
on disk. When this program get's put in flash the stage1 is just abandoneed and
it is jumped to directly.

The very attractive side result is we end up with a seperate system usable by
people that do not or can not use our (right now non existant) BIOS.

The BIOS team can sort the rest of this shit out later. Even if
part/most/whatever of the boot code needs to be redone, what will remain are all 
the real mode utils (IE chain type loaders) left over from the boot system.

IMO we should just start hacking at GRUB. For instance being able to run a real
mode util them fall back should be put in. OS/2 and NT will not boot directly
for me. Fix this. Fix other OS's. When (if) the time comes we start over taking
chunks of our optimized code out of what we did in GRUB.

[Benjamin Scott]

Dave Cinege  wrote:
DC> The boot loader team can start coding NOW. 
DC> 
DC> The very attractive side result is we end up with a seperate system
usable by
DC> people that do not or can not use our (right now non existant) BIOS.
DC>
DC> IMO we should just start hacking at GRUB.

Hmmm... yeah... it seems "less then elegant" at first glance, but has
the distinct advantage of actually working.  :-)  And you're right in
that getting us a better boot loader, independent of location (disk or
flash) would be nice no matter what.  My only suggestion: Don't be
afraid to scrap large parts of code from GRUB if needed.  Remember the
maxim, "Be prepared to write every program at least twice."  :-)

-- Ben

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[Chris Arguin]

On Sun, 1 Mar 1998, Dave Cinege wrote:
> OK, enough screwing around.

Here here... We can always argue *while* working :)
> My proposal:
>
> Split the project into 2 working areas...
> BIOS
> Boot loader
> The BIOS team can sort the rest of this shit out later. Even if
> part/most/whatever of the boot code needs to be redone, what will remain are all 
> the real mode utils (IE chain type loaders) left over from the boot system.

So what exactly is the core BIOS team working on? As I see it

Hardware initialization (to conservative parameters to start with)
Providing Interrupt services
Starting the Bootloader

For the various chipsets around the first part will differ wildly, so we
will have to devise some scheme of choosing which chipset to compile it.
Interrupt services will initially, I guess, come from Boch. The bootloader
will basically work as it does in current BIOS.

Count me in on the BIOS team I guess.

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