Shane, I don't know if you read my old mails which I've sent to Alistair
Riddoch and to the ELKS-list, but this already exists (BOOTELKS by Steffen
Gabel), what is need is a effort to change this code for don't write any
VII, just start ELKS. The wheel is almost complete.
I'm trying this alone (at least I don't know who more is trying do this) and
I don't have assembly language skills to understand all code or HPLX boot
process, but I'm trying to learn.
If you or somebody in the list could help me to understand the BOOTELKS.ASM
and how HPLX works we could have a solution faster.
Isaque.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Shane Kerr [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Tuesday, May 04, 1999 8:05 AM
> To: Alistair Riddoch
> Cc: David Murn; Mailing List
> Subject: Booting ELKS from DOS Re: your mail
>
> On Tue, 4 May 1999, Alistair Riddoch wrote:
>
> > David Murn writes:
> > >
> > > On Mon, 3 May 1999, Alistair Riddoch wrote:
> > >
> > > > The problem is that the only disk driver we have working yet is the
> one
> > > > that uses BIOS routines to access the disk. After DOS is loaded the
> int 13h
> > > > entry in the VII which initially points to this BIOS routine is
> replaced.
> > > >
> > > > BootELKS gets round this by having an image of the VII before DOS
> was
> > > > loaded, and loading this into the VII before the kernel is started,
> giving
> > > > the kernel access to the BIOS routines.
> > >
> > > Oh, in that case it's easy, we simply write a little chunk of code to
> put
> > > at the start of a disk, which simply copies the VII to some point
> later in
> > > the disk, to be retrieved by a DOS program.
> >
> > The problem is that with palmtops which boot from ROM we don't have
> access
> > to the machine until DOS has started. There is no boot disk, so we
> cannot
> > put any code on it.
>
> Here's what I'd like to see with booting ELKS from a palmtop:
>
> 1) boot to DOS, with as little in-memory as possible (this is 620 Kbyte or
> so on an HP200LX, I believe)
>
> 2) have a boot loader that allocates all of the available memory from DOS
> in a single block
>
> 3) use that block as the memory that ELKS can play in
>
> 4) only change the interrupts you need to (keyboard, serial, timer), and
> possibly chain some of those (like the timer interrupt)
>
> With a system like this, you could even exit ELKS to return to DOS if need
> be. Unfortunately, I have no idea how much effort this would be to
> create. I suppose I can start looking at the code when I get back home
> (next week), just to get a feel for the scope.
>
> As a plus, you could use the DOS services in the same way that you can use
> BIOS for operations today. This would make it possible to use a DOS file
> as an ELKS boot disk, which would be nice for the HP200LX, for instance,
> which uses its memory above 640 Kbyte as a proprietary persistant RAM
> drive. You could even access Stacker drives and the like.
>
> Hmm...maybe ELKS would be better marketed as Unix-on-FreeDOS?
>
> Shane
