On Mon, 3 May 1999, Matt Porter wrote:
> On Mon, 3 May 1999, Naushit Sakarvadia wrote:
[snip]
> > I consider if I want to remove BIOS from my Single board computer?
[snip]
> There are gains to be had for bypassing the firmware...notably the
> flexibility of having your own slim bootloader and no bloated BIOS boot
> sequence to go through. However, the overhead to get there is enormous.
> Bringing modern high-end systems up from scratch can be a PITA. Also, if
> you want to take your code to an updated hardware platform when a new SBC
> comes out, you have to rework your entire bootloader.
This was on the Linux Kernel list this weekend. Apparantly, there is
already some code that does this initialization for the Alpha port.
--Jeremy
Jeremy Impson
Network Engineer
Advanced Technologies Department
Lockheed Martin Federal Systems
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
phone: 607-751-5618
fax: 607-751-6025
-----------------
Forwarded Message
-----------------
From: "Kendall Bennett" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Sun, 2 May 1999 14:16:52 -0800
Subject: Who owns the x86emu project?
Hi All,
I am trying to figure out who the author and/or current maintainer of
the x86emu project is. The current DEC Alpah Milo sources (which
don't appear to have been updated to 2.2 yet) include the x86emu
library, which is used to run the BIOS on the ISA/PCI graphics
controller to initialise it when the system boots. The emulator works
on some cards, but it lacking lots of support code for 32-bit
instructions in 16-bit code (ie: mov eax,ebx etc with the operand
size prefix).
Anyway, I have had some great success so far on some graphics cards
with this emulator, and I want to flesh it out and make it work on
all graphics cards. When I am done, we will be able to use this
emulator to bring up graphics cards on any system with an ISA/PCI/AGP
bus, as well as use it to bring up secondary controllers on x86
systems that are not POST'ed by the BIOS. It could also be used by
the Linux kernel on any processor to allow the VESA fbcon driver to
safely make calls to the BIOS at runtime to do things such as change
display modes and program the color palette.
However before I dive head first into this, I would like to find out
where the absolute latest version of the sources are so I don't end
up doing duplicate work. Also if there is a different, but more
complete x86 emulator library around, perhaps I should work with that
instead.
Regards,
+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| SciTech Software - Building Truly Plug'n'Play Software! |
+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| Kendall Bennett | Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] |
| Director of Engineering | Phone: (530) 894 8400 |
| SciTech Software, Inc. | Fax : (530) 894 9069 |
| 505 Wall Street | ftp : ftp.scitechsoft.com |
| Chico, CA 95928, USA | www : http://www.scitechsoft.com |
+---------------------------------------------------------------+
