Re: ELKS and TCP/IP
Is the TCP/IP project totally dead, or is someone still working on it? I have an ATT PC6300 just waiting for me to install ELKS on it, but without a TCP/IP stack, it is of limited use to me. I **really** want to put it back into service!! Thanks - Larry AFAIK nobody's doing anything. I saw that Guy Lancaster's ucip stack is out there and ported to a micro or two. Only does PPP though. It appears to be derived from KA9Q, BSD and Linux code. I think the site is http://www.ucos-ii.com/
Re: 32KB EEPROM on 3COM509B ISA/PnP
Hallo ELKS-friends ! I have a problem with my 3COM 3C509B ISA/PnP card. I can use 16KB boot roms, but if I want to use 32KB eproms (like 27C256B), the config tool 3c5x9cfg.exe set a range of for example c8000-cbfff, but 32KB should be c8000-c. Only the first 16KB can be used. Why, where is the problem. I reported this problem also to 3COM. Greetings Christoph Plattner I've never seen this. Are you sure you have the most up to date version of the config tool and that it's right for your board revision? BTW, this doesn't have much to do with ELKS, unless you are planning on putting ELKS code into the ROM.
Re: EPROMS on 3com 509 cards
Hello, Does anyone have an idea of witch EPROM's are compatible with the 3com 509bCombo NIC for use in the boot prom slot ??? Cheers G It will take 8kB, 16kB or 32kB (2764, 27128, 27256). Usually you will see a C after 27, that means CMOS == lower current consumption.
Re: a.out - memory hex dump??
Take a a.out executable and convert it to a hex dump of the memory it will occupy (once loaded) and then transfer it across to the machine, and jump to the base location. How can I do the expanding bit? Are the tools out there already? Or do I have to code it myself? GNU objcopy might do the conversion for you, it understands lots of formats.
Re: Questions
IMHO, and if my rusty RAM serves, an 8253 was the normal serial chip on the old CP/M and early DOS machines. Er no, the 8253 is a programmable interval timer made by Intel. You may be thinking of the 8250, a UART made by National Semiconductor.
Re: ELKS 0.0.81 available from ftp.ecs.soton.ac.uk
How do Video BIOS make sure they are executed before everything else? Video BIOSes are looked for as a special case. They are normally located from C to C8000.
Re: ELKS NIC that will take a 64K rom
I am now stuck. I have tried a 3c509B, an SMC Ultra, and SMC 'Western Digital' card, and various older NICS, and none of them take more than 32K. The only remaining options are purpose build cards. Another possibility is two NICs with a 32kB ROM each.
Re: ELKS NIC that will take a 64K rom
I have a 3c905 in my desktop machine which can take 64K or 128K, but it is not clearly documented anywhere I can find which end of the socket I am supposed to put the ROM, and I could not get it to work in either end when I tried it in both. The other problem is that this card is PCI, so wont go in my test machines, and the fact that I use this machine for development, and for my job. I think the 905 takes a flash PROM, not a UVEPROM. Besides it's PCI and the boot ROM is mapped in by the PnP BIOS, so that's no good for ELKS.
Re: ELKS NIC that will take a 64K rom
I am now stuck. I have tried a 3c509B, an SMC Ultra, and SMC 'Western Digital' card, and various older NICS, and none of them take more than 32K. The only remaining options are purpose build cards. Have you considered using a compressed ROM image like Etherboot does? With that you could get about 48k of code+initdata. BSS is blank of coures. It would have to run out of RAM after decompression of course.
Re: ELKS 0.0.81 available from ftp.ecs.soton.ac.uk
The code Christian has contributed does just this, though I have not yet been able to get it to work as I am still tracking down a network card that will take a 64K ROM. I have the plans for a flashcard, but have not yet been able to get thte parts to build one. I've seen some NE2000 clones that take 64 kB ROMs. I am slightly confused about the int 19h issue however. If cassette BASIC uses this mechanism, but is not envoked until Floppy and HDD boot have failed, is this what we want? I have seen references in BIOS setup programs which refer to "int 18h devices such as network boot". Is int 18h also used by boot ROMS, and if so how does it differ from int 19h? Basic uses INT18H. The bootstrap entry point is INT19H. This should try the primary bootstrap device, which could fall back to local booting if network booting fails.
Re: ELKS 0.0.81 available from ftp.ecs.soton.ac.uk
Sorry, my fingers wasn't syncronized with my brain. What I meant was: So we are back to the usual problem, where in the 640kB..1024kB range should we put or own EPROM. Somewhere free from C8000 to F.
Re: ELKS 0.0.81 available from ftp.ecs.soton.ac.uk
Actually, 'format' simply means 0x55aa at the start of the image, and the 3rd byte contains the number of 256 byte pages in the ROM. Nothing else is involved in the 'format'. 0x55aa number of 256 word = 512 byte pages entry point, entered with long jump and cs = segment of ROM All the bytes in the image must checksum to 0.
Re: ELKS 0.0.81 available from ftp.ecs.soton.ac.uk
I have come across a few old machies that had sockets like this, but never one that actually had a BASIC rom in it. I don't know what the ROM in this socket needs to contain in order for the BIOS to recognise it as a BASIC ROM and run it if boot fails. I think the BASIC ROM has a particular entry address for iniitialisation and hooks to INT18H I think.
Re: there's still life in the Z80
http://www.zilog.com/ez80/ Someone now design a cool linux box with the ez80. Would it be possible as it has a MMU and supports 16mb of memory ? I looked at the datasheets and there are a couple of things that would make life harder for compiler writers. In Address Data Long mode (what they call the new mode), data is 24 bits. Which is a rather odd size so C compilers might just keep int=16 bits and long=32 bits. Also offsets from IX and IY are still signed 8 bits. This makes it more combersome to do large stack frames. Howver one interesting bit that emerges is the acknowledgment that the Z80 contained undocumented instructions that can address the separate halves of IX and IY. Anyway this is getting a bit off topic for ELKS.
there's still life in the Z80
Seen on /. Zilog announces the eZ80. http://www.zilog.com/ez80/ Mentions a TCP/IP stack too.
Re: Re Z80-8088, was: Linux on TI?
As far as I was told, the Zilog company was founded by some developers from I ntel that disagreed on the calling convention(and probably other things too) Not quite, Zilog wanted to build a superset of the 8080. Also it had simpler hardware interfacing, single 5V supply instead of several, simplier clock source, etc. Also I was given the impression that the 8086 was a Military grade of the 808 8. But Intel has used a lot of energy to downgrade their top CPU to satisfy m ore market segments. So the 8088 might be a civilian version of the 8086. The 8086 came first, and the 8088 was an 8-bit external bus version which made interfacing to memory cheaper at a performance cost.
Re: Linux on TI?
I thought the Z80s were near 8088s or 188s...am I on Dr Pepper again??? No, they are more like 8080s. 8088s are 16 bit machines, whereas the Z80 remains an 8 bit machine.
Re: [Fwd: syntax doc. about as86]
Personally I think if as86 code were converted this way, you keep the as86 users happy. There's another advantage with this means of conversion that I forgot to mention. By using macros to retain compatibility with as86, it's easy to do regression tests to ensure the semantics of the code have not changed. As I convert the code to use my macros, I periodically run this make rule: first: first.S gcc -DUSE_AS86 -E -traditional -o first.s first.S as86 -0 -b first first.s cmp first first.ref where first.ref is a binary saved from a pristine assembly.
Re: [Fwd: syntax doc. about as86]
I'm translatting the assembler source code of Linux (as86) to Nasm syntax. I need to understand the syntax of as86 wich is (very??) different from Nasm's one, in particular : Ye gods. Umm no idea movb4(di),*36; (What mean the * prefix of value 36) ; does 4(di) means [di+4] ??? Do you know where I can find any documentation. If not may be I can reach Bruce Evans himself. Hi all, Like part of my previous message will show you, I will apreciate any documentation on as86 syntax, I mean, may be a document where stuff like previous 'movb 4(di),*36' will be explain. This is equivalent to movb [di+4],#36, or in nasm format mov byte [di+4],36 Personally I think it's a double edged sword that as86 supports many equivalent syntaxes for the same purpose. I have developed a set of macros that allow me to assemble a file under as86 or nasm with the change of a #define. It requires a bit of discipline, i.e. no gratuitous use of alternate syntax, e.g. ; instead of !, db/dw/dd instead of .byte/.word/.long, some macros to cope with the constant/reference distinction, i.e. as86: CON(x) - *x LOC(x) - x STRDECL(x) - .ascii x nasm: CON(x) - x LOC(x) - [x] STRDECL(x) - db x Some pathological constructs need #ifdef AS86 and #ifdef NASM, but I can get away with perhaps 10 or so in 2000 lines of assembler. It works pretty well and I have attained byte for byte match of the resulting binaries, except for instructions like xchg ax,bx which have two equivalent forms, of course. Personally I think if as86 code were converted this way, you keep the as86 users happy. You can see the use of this technique in contrib/mkfreedosnbi/first.S, src/loader.asm and src/zloader.asm in the Etherboot distribution at www.slug.org.au/etherboot
Re: BCC and ANSI C without pain
Yes, BCC doesn't even check prototypes when the "-ansi" switch is given. It just pipes the text through unprotoize. Sorry, please explain to me again what we would gain by using the P() macros that unprotoize doesn't already do? I mean, isn't the source already or potentially ANSI syntax without using P() macros, and unprotoize just makes it palatable to bcc?
Re: Technical question boot problem
I bet it definitely works (boot on XT drive) if one disables the onboard IDE first. The problem I see is using IDE and MFM/RLL drives at the same time, which might prove difficult. To boot XT drives on an AT+, one usually has to disable the IDE drives so that the BIOS doesn't go looking there. XT controllers usually have an extension BIOS to hook into the main BIOS boot entry point.
Re: [Fwd: C compiler for AppleII+]
The story I got told was there was something amiss with the Stacks on the MOS 6502, like they're not big enough or something. Anyone hear about this? On the 6502, the high byte of the stack pointer is the constant 01 so the stack has to live on page 1; 256 bytes worth.
Re: chmod +t
Can anyone tell me if the "t" mode for executables does anything. Sometimes referred to as the "sticky bit", it is supposed to make an executable stay in swap space after it is run, so the next time it is run it simply swaps in and executes. Not anymore in modern Unixes. BTW, linux-8086 is not the list for big Linux questions. Cheers, Ken
Re: LPD, printing filter, terminal program and other tools
That uses (3) as a "transparent print spooler", as per my quoted comment, and the development of a "translating print spooler" using utilities such as ghostscript (can that be easily ported to ELKS) would follow from there. Transparent print spoolers will work but I think translating print spoolers are a bit optimistic. A friend of mine tried to run ghostscript on his diskless 386 but it took ages to render anything. Besides have you looked at the size of ghostscript.
Re: Off-Topic: EPROMs?
I have an 8086 that I'd like to use for some embedded projects. One of these is the dream of many linux people: the toaster that runs linux. Hehe... 'telnet toaster'... Anyways, I have a bunch of EPROMs that I'd like to program, but I can't get the silly things to erase. They're supposed to be UV-erasable, but I don't have a good source of UV. I tried sunlight but apparently the ozone is too thick here. Can anyone suggest a source of UV suitable for erasing EPROMs, preferably without too much skin cancer :) You need a germicidal lamp (looks like a short fluorescent tube and also uses a ballast) and a light tight enclosure (the UV will damage your eyes). Do a Web search, there should be some circuits around. Sunlight will take weeks if not years.
Re: some questions
I'm new to this list and am wondering if the message below means to imply that an 8086 system with expanded memory is not supported because drivers for all the different bank-switching schemes do not exist. I have the same question for 80286 systems with extended memory cards. Expanded memory cards are problematic because each card potentially had it's own hardware scheme. Extended memory cards are not a problem. Extended memory is just extended memory. But I haven't seen the PM version of ELKS yet.
enhanced version of wattcp
http://www.bgnett.no/%7egiva/ Gisle Vanem did this work. It includes a BSD socket style API. It might be of some use to ELKS.
Re: date
: * Usage: /bin/date : * date [?[?]] | date One small point: Isn't '?' a shell wildcard character? This means that if w ildcards are enabled on the shell (currently not with ELKS, but should be) then the ? will have to be escaped? Perhaps we should use a more standard option scheme, with dashes. Greg Yes probably -i for interactive input or -s for set or something like that.
someone's embedded system project: tiny PPC board
This appeared in slashdot.org, maybe it's much easier to deal with than the x86 architecture. http://www.rpcgllc.com/rpcgproducts.htm Anyway it's getting a bit off-topic for this list.
