are there problems with this email? - what is a disc on chip? - beginner's question

Antony Stone Antony at Soft-Solutions.co.uk
Wed Jan 8 18:43:00 CET 2003


On Wednesday 08 January 2003 10:46 pm, Alessio Sangalli wrote:

> Antony Stone wrote:

> > Because they do not have a large enough capacity.   Standard BIOS
> > chips are
> > 2megabits (= 32 kilobytes), which is not neough to hold a Linux kernel.
>
> 256KB perhaps?

Sorry - yes, 256kbytes is correct.

> And how many mbits are those disc-on-chip?

The ones most people use (MD-2800-D08) are 8 megabytes.

> So even if I have a flash big enough to store a complete kernel, I won't
> be able to use it with linuxbios? Only for diskless boxes perhaps? What
> if I do have an hard disk in the system?

If you have a flash chip big enough fro a kernel I don't think it'll fit into 
the normal 32 pin socket used by 2 mbit BIOS chips.

However, if you can get a kernel into a chip, then you can certainly have 
your root fs on a hard drive or across a network.

> I'm surprised, I though it was easy to find few megaBYTES flash chips
> nowadays. Isn't it possible to use my 8MB compact-flash card? ehhehe

Yes, it is.   You can get IDE to compact flash adapters, and this will let 
you boot your machine from CF without needing LinuxBIOS.

> However, I must say the price of a DoC is quite high... very comparable
> to the cost of a pcchips motherboard, which I can find for as low as
> 45EUR... 30 (plus shipping!) for the DoC is much...

Please tell me where to get a PC-Chips motherboard for 45 Euro.   I like the 
sound of this.

> There is no other possible solution about this? I will have an IDE hard
> disk in the system... perhaps it's possible to have a working LB without
> a DoC?

You can get LinuxBIOS + etherboot into a 2 Mbit Flash chip if you can boot a 
kernel across the network.

Regards,

Antony.

-- 

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.
You'll feel much better about things once you do.



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