OpenBIOS status

[Kevin P. Lawton]

Hey OpenBIOS team,

Can you folks me a quick snapshot of how things
are working out with OpenBIOS?

You probably have at least heard of my project "bochs".
A long time ago someone from the OpenBIOS project contacted
me, and wanted to know if they could use my BIOS
as a starting point or reference for OpenBIOS.

Anyhow, I've started another project, more or less an
open source clone of the commercial program "VMWare".
You can check it out at:

news://news.redhat.com/redhat.projects.freemware
  http://www.freemware.org

We're going to be needing an open source BIOS for
that project.  I have no problem with using the BIOS
from bochs as a starting point, but I thought I'd
contact you folks and see if it makes sense to sync
up with your efforts.

Freemware has potential to be a *really* big Linux
project, and thus receive a ton of support.  So this
may very well help out your project.

Thanks,
-Kevin Lawton
http://www.bochs.com
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Status

[azhar]

Hi there,

I just wanted to know what are you guys doing now.

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Status

[Brian Smith]

Hello,
    My name is Brian Smith and i just subscribed to your mailing list.  I
am really interested in how the bios interacts with an ide controller (
how to read a sector or write a sector via the controller and skip the
bios).  do you have any information on that if you do could you send me
it.  Also do you have a up to date cmos memory layout.  I have gotten a
couple off the internet but they are the old ones.  They are good but
they only cover very little of the memory layout.  Again any information
on these subjects would be helpful.  I would also like to help you guys
with your project.  Im not to fimilair with what you are doing but i am
interested in learning..

Thanks 
    	Brian Smith
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Status

[vincent zimmer]

The problem w/ a CMOS map is that beyond the first 34h bytes, the board
manufacturer's BIOS is not constrained by any standard regarding the
allocation of the  rest of the 80h bytes of space (for 128byte CMOS).  The
only suggestion for an OpenBIOS initiative would be to standardize CMOS
usage for any designs they support (i.e., come up with a standard MAP that
all OpenBIOS implementations will support).  For good software engineering,
you probably want a layer of indirection between CMOS locations and actual
storage offset (tokenized or handles for access) anyway, so the issue might
not be that big of a deal.

For information on programming an IDE disk drive, see
    http://fission.dt.wdc.com/ata/ata-3/
and grab a doc, something like ata3-r6.doc.

ATA is "AT Attachment", or the name of the hardware specification which
dictates how IDE drives should behave.  This specification details the I/O
addresses that the motherboard & drive must decode, plus the commands that
the drive supports.  The most notable ones from the BIOS perspective are:

RESET DRIVE
    IDENTIFY 
    READ SECTOR
    WRITE SECTOR

BIOS supports disk access through software interrupt 13h services, or entry
point 4ch in the real-mode interrupt vector table.

Some of the commands are:

Reset Drive
    	dl = drive # (80h - primary, 81h secondary)
    	ah = 0		(reset command)

Read sector
    	ah = 2
    	....

This Int-software callable interface is a legacy of DOS, and still used by
real-mode OS loaders for contemporary OS's prior to the loading of enough
of the kernel to hop into protected mode and blow away the BIOS services.

At 10:36 PM 5/25/99 -0700, Brian Smith wrote:
> Hello,
>    My name is Brian Smith and i just subscribed to your mailing list.  I
> am really interested in how the bios interacts with an ide controller (
> how to read a sector or write a sector via the controller and skip the
> bios).  do you have any information on that if you do could you send me
> it.  Also do you have a up to date cmos memory layout.  I have gotten a
> couple off the internet but they are the old ones.  They are good but
> they only cover very little of the memory layout.  Again any information
> on these subjects would be helpful.  I would also like to help you guys
> with your project.  Im not to fimilair with what you are doing but i am
> interested in learning..
>
> Thanks 
>    	Brian Smith
>
> To Unsubscribe: send mail to [e-mail]
> with "unsubscribe openbios" in the body of the message

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AW: Status

[Stephan Müller]

Hi.
> it.  Also do you have a up to date cmos memory layout.  I have gotten a
> couple off the internet but they are the old ones.  They are good but
> they only cover very little of the memory layout.  Again any information
> on these subjects would be helpful.  I would also like to help you guys
> with your project.  Im not to fimilair with what you are doing but i am
> interested in learning..

I've got a c-sourcecode for direct access to the IDE-controller.
I can try to send it to you, just give me your email-add and i'll send it to
you.

Ciao,
    Stephan

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OpenBIOS for use with Freemware

Hi folks,

One of the issues which was brought up in our
freemware discussion forum (see our project at
http://www.freemware.org) was what BIOS to
use.

I have no problem starting with the one I
distribute with bochs, which I wrote.  But
I want to avoid duplication of efforts.

I recently joined this group.  Can someone
give me a snapshot of how things are going
with your free BIOS project?

Thanks,
-Kevin
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