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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