I think what we want is called Nuni.
http://www.linuxforum.com/plug/articles/nuni.html
It's written in nasm and pretty straight forward. i've been working on
converting it to an elf compatible format, switching the video io to
serial, and adding a delay for the time anticipated to have the hard
drives spin up, but haven't gotten it quite right yet. It looks to be just
what we need in the most minimalist fashion.
(it will only work on lba compatible ide drives by the way)
I've also tried contacting the author but haven't been able to get through
to him yet.
On 8 Aug 2001, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> Ronald G Minnich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
> > Anybody seen a new motherboard for sis 730 that has 32dip?
> >
> > This 256KB FLASH thing is getting to be more, not less of a problem.
> > Anybody out there have a clever idea on how to get around it?
>
> I guess as I see it. linuxBIOS is small. We just need to make certain
> we have a bootloader that is also small.
>
> A unix style kernel without a network stack can be small enough to fit
> comfortably in 32KB uncompressed. So it becomes a matter of getting
> a small unix kernel we can use. For what we want to do that is really
> the long term solution. We just need to either send the linux kernel
> on a diet (my prefered option) or start with something like uzix and
> build it up to the point we can use it.
>
> Being safe from the becoming a hacked operating system problem is more
> important than reusing drivers. Though being able to reuse drivers is
> nice. And as long as we limit ourselves to a certain subset of the
> common cases so we only need to write drivers for industry standard
> hardware we are in good shape.
>
> Eric
>
