Announce: a little peace of actual code

[Bertil Nilsson]

On Mon, 9 Nov 1998 daniel.engstrom at riksnett.no wrote:
> Hello!
> 
> The last few weeks I have been experimenting with some boot up code, 
> and I though some one might want to look at and/or play with it.
> 
> It can boot, enter protected mode uncompress the main firmware and jump
> to it. I currently work on some RAM detection testing routines.
> 
> my current stuff (as of before the weekend) can be downloaded from 
> http://www.lillfab.se/gfw-0.1.tar.gz
> 
> /Daniel 
> -- 

Hey,

I've looked some at your code, and seems pretty nice for a basic
framework. At least its better than nothing and I strongly believe that
if we ever plan to get this thing on the road we have to start writing
some code. Maybe (hopefully) there are more out there who have written
something so maybe we should try to agree on some of the basic framework
and then start out in a small scale. Anyhow that's my thoughts thus far,
flame me if you like ;).

As I see it there is a _tiny_ problem for people without access to the
proper electronic devices (e.g. EPROM programmers), like me. So I've
started out with Daniel's code as a base trying to write a simple 
floppy loader that will work like this: First we let the normal BIOS
bootstrap us, then we load our ROM image into memory someplace nice.
After that we have to get rid of the old BIOS in some nice way ;).
Here's where I sense potentional problems. Cleaning the interrupt 
table and resetting the PICs and stuff will probably work pretty well,
but what if the BIOS already initialized other devices? Comments are
welcome!!

Bertil
bertil at k2.lund.se