On Mon, 17 May 1999, Brendan Simon wrote:
>
> To make things really easy, I would put a Disk-On-Chip
> (http://www.m-sys.com) flash device on your board. It has an IDE interface and
> comes in 2, 4, 8, 12, 24, 40, 72 & 144MB versions. They are a little pricy but
> they make things very easy and very fast to get up and running. Because they look
> like any other IDE device, you can use the existing drivers without any
> modifications. You can even use LILO as your bootloader, have multiple partitions
> and multiple operating systems (eg. Linux, Windows, etc).
>
> You basically have to run your own bios (if you are not using a standard one) to
> initialise the basic hardware (DRAM etc), read the MBR of the DOC, load the
> bootcode to DRAM and run it. I think there is an OpenFirmware page somewhere but
> I don't know the URL. You could use it as a basis and strip out the stuff you
> don't need.
>
> Brendan Simon.
We have tried the Disk-On-Chip on a PC/104 board, and we were not able to get it to
work, although apparently some people have. The device only appears as an IDE
device because of the driver that M-Systems provides. From what I've heard, you can
get a solid state (compact flash I think) disk ( called ??sans?? Disk or something
like that) which has a real IDE interface. One thing to keep in mind is that the
Disk-On-Chip devices use some proprietary/patented algorithms which cannot be
released as open source. You have to use the binaries that are provided by M-Systems.
Patrick
