[LinuxBIOS] Booting into MSDOS

[Jordan Crouse]

On 18/05/07 22:24 +0200, Peter Stuge wrote:
> On Fri, May 18, 2007 at 09:02:31PM +0100, MARTIN WOODHOUSE wrote:
> > Question, then :   will LinuxBIOS allow booting from (specifically)
> > a RAM device in one of the USB ports?
> 
> LinuxBIOS, ADLO and Bochs could be made to boot from USB storage but
> it needs some work. I don't think Bochs does USB storage.

Which is understandable.  USB is a very annoying and complex protocol,
made more so complex by the fact that you need to shoehorn it into a
traditional C-H-S addressing scheme. Stop for a moment and appreciate
all those anonymous BIOS developers that worked so hard so that you could
casually boot DOS from a USB key on an AMD64 platform in the year 2007 
just like it was the year 1987.  It might be trivial to you, but somewhere,
somebody had to go out of their way to make it go.

> > If so, I can almost certainly make a bootable RAM-stick, one vague
> > area being that Illumination runs in VGA graphics mode?
> 
> I for one would really love to see you port Illumination over to
> Linux instead. While I realizes it's designed around DOS and legacy
> PC architecture I think a forward port is by far the cleanest
> solution, and where effort is best spent. Of course, that's just my
> humble opinion.
> 
> As far as the OLPC platform goes, there will never be a VGA interface
> at least with an open source BIOS, so that will be a showstopper. The
> Linux framebuffer API is fully supported however, and X on top of
> that as I've understood it.

Indeed.  The Geode has a perfectly good 2D accelerator with all the
fixin's.  But VGA isn't the only show-stopper - none of the software
interrupts are supported, so DOS will really be quite helpless.
If you have a DOS application you want to run natively on XO hardware,
you have two choices - either port it to Linux, or license a legacy
BIOS from one of the Geode BIOS vendors.

Jordan

PS: I say natively, because somebody mentioned dosemu.  I don't see
any reason why that wouldn't work for you.