Hi, I have been toying with incorporating Etherboot into LinuxBIOS. The thought process for this is the following: The devices I am playing with may start being manufactured in quite large volume. The flash devices I am using are SMD devices directly on the PCB. When it comes to production programming of these devices, doing it via a network is a fine way to go. Also, in the (OK I know unlikely) event that part of the flash device becomes corrupt, it would be nice to be able to just plug it inot a network and reflash it. The mechanism for this is as follows: A small flash device will be 'plugged' into the board using a bed of nails. This device will have LinuxBIOS in it, with a slightly modified etherboot module. It will try to find a Linux Kernel (Which it won't find), and will then kick off etherboot, which will grab a kernel off a server, load some software from the server and then program the flash devices on the board. I have hit a bit of a problem and am looking for some PMode guru's out there. In Etherboot, we need some timer mechanism to do reasonable timeouts etc. If I were using a pentium cpu, this would be really easy, just using RDTSC, but of course I am not (486 core). OK so now I am left with using a timer with an ISR. I have never set up an IDT or an ISR at this level in PMODE from within GAS. Can anyone help! What I want to do is to set up a valid IDT in start32.S (no idea how to do this correctly), set up the PIT (easy), write an ISR to handle a 'clock tick' (never done this in GAS in PMODE), and then make sure that it all locates and runs correctly. TIA Hamish
