Shane Kerr writes:
>
> I'm fairly excited about the plans to incorporate loadable device drivers
> in ELKS. Unfortunately, after I thought about it, they STILL won't help
> me get my HP 200LX booted. :(
>
> The problem is that there is neither a floppy drive nor a hard disc on the
> machine, which I believe ELKS requires to boot. As I see it, I have two
> options. Option #1 is to use ROMFS to bootstrap to the point where I can
> load a PCMCIA driver. I have some questions about that, though:
>
> Can I use ROMFS to boot ELKS?
Not yet. ROMfs is not quite complete. It should be relatively simple to
finish it though. According to the guy who started the port it was just a
case of converting the code to K&R C, and adjusting it to 16bits.
> If I do, how do I specify the contents of the file system?
You would need a ramdisk image to be loaded by the bootloader which would then
contain the ROMFS filesystem. All we would need is a special config option
in the RAMdisk driver so it knows about the image the bootloader had
loaded.
> Can I change to a different root after boot time?
This I don't know, and it is totally necessary to the cause. I suspect we
may have to do some strange stuff to achieve this.
> If so, can I free the memory used by ROMFS after boot?
If you mean the memory taken by the ROMfs image, then yes easily. If you
mean the space in the kernel taken by the ROMfs code then no. It might be
more useful to use a MINIXfs image to keep kernel code down to a minimum.
> If not, how much memory does ROMFS use anyway?
Don't know the answer to that until we have it completely working.
> Does ELKS support symbolic links?
>
Yes, of course. Come to think of it I don't remember having ever tested
this, but the code is in the kernel.
>
> Option #2 is to just add PCMCIA support to the kernel, and compile out all
> the things I don't need, like floppy, hard disk, and parallel support.
> Hmm...
>
I would go down this road to start with, and then see what we can do later
about making the drivers user space.
Al
