On Fri, Nov 02, 2018 at 01:07:20AM +0300, Mike Banon wrote:
All the floppy images available at CBFS will be found and listed in a boot menu, instead of the first found. Could be highly valuable if you are participating in a hobby OS development - would like to test multiple versions of your floppy in the same coreboot image, to reduce the amount of re-flashes and accelerate the development at bare metal
- or simply would like to access multiple floppies as a coreboot user;
for example: KolibriOS (nice assembly OS with GUI), FreeDOS, Visopsys and memtest (coreboot's own memtest version is a bit buggy, e.g. external USB keyboard isn't working there at some laptops)
Thanks. However I'm concerned that this would reserve memory for all of the floppy images in the e820 map (and thus the final OS would not be able to use that memory). I think if multiple floppy support was desired then we'd want to delay memory reservation until after a particular image was selected in the boot menu.
-Kevin
However I'm concerned that this would reserve memory for all of the floppy images in the e820 map (and thus the final OS would not be able to use that memory).
sorry Kevin I'm not fully understanding the consequences. Would reserving e820 memory for all the floppies - result in a slightly lower amount of available RAM to OS (e.g. just 14 MB lower if I add 10 floppies) or there could be more serious problems? When I've been testing this patch - together with "35 boot menu entries" patch by Ivan - https://mail.coreboot.org/pipermail/seabios/2017-June/011416.html - I added about 30 floppies and everything seemed to work perfectly. If there are no other possible problems, I am okay with slightly lower amount of RAM - and only the "multiple floppies" users will be affected. Also, what's good about this patch is that its' only a small change for SeaBIOS source code - mostly placing the "floppy searching" code inside the "for" cycle. But I could try to do something with the allocation part if that wouldn't turn out too difficult
On Sat, Nov 10, 2018 at 9:16 PM Kevin O'Connor kevin@koconnor.net wrote:
On Fri, Nov 02, 2018 at 01:07:20AM +0300, Mike Banon wrote:
All the floppy images available at CBFS will be found and listed in a boot menu, instead of the first found. Could be highly valuable if you are participating in a hobby OS development - would like to test multiple versions of your floppy in the same coreboot image, to reduce the amount of re-flashes and accelerate the development at bare metal
- or simply would like to access multiple floppies as a coreboot user;
for example: KolibriOS (nice assembly OS with GUI), FreeDOS, Visopsys and memtest (coreboot's own memtest version is a bit buggy, e.g. external USB keyboard isn't working there at some laptops)
Thanks. However I'm concerned that this would reserve memory for all of the floppy images in the e820 map (and thus the final OS would not be able to use that memory). I think if multiple floppy support was desired then we'd want to delay memory reservation until after a particular image was selected in the boot menu.
-Kevin
-
Kevin O'Connor -
Mike Banon