On 12/15/07, Timothy Normand Miller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 12/15/07, Stephen Pollei <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > I think just going with nasm is the right answer > I think I used nasm because it took the intel syntax (as opposed to > AT&T, right?) yes nasm uses intel, gas uses at&t by default but can be switched. > One of the things I > disassembled with it was an x86 VGA BIOS (a proprietary one, but the > vendor told us we could do it, because we had a contract with them). > Which of these assemblers is most common? gas would be the more common, anybody that has gcc installed has gas as well. if you do a `gcc -S foo.c` then the foo.s is what gas would use. > doing an informal vote. > I cast my vote for nasm, because it's the one I have installed, and I > don't have gas. I vote for nasm as well. My vote doesn't count as much as yours does though. > > The real different between nasm and gas would be the directives. Also > > I think gas might be geared pretty heavy for being 32/64bit flat and > > outputing elf or other object files and not raw binaries. nasm might > > be a bit more flexible for what we'd need to do. > We need to output raw binary code with no extra junk so that we can > just burn it to the PROM. yes I think gas is more geared for making object files that later get linked etc. I'm not even sure if or how you'd get it to output just a raw binary. > > > solaris, (free|net|open)bsd, os x aka darwin aka YAbsd, linux, > > windows (xp|vista), hurd, qnx, plan-9, reactos. > > fedora, ubuntu, netbsd, solaris, > > darwin, windows xp, windows vista, centos, suse should cover it well > > enough. > There's always a chance that we have some bug that makes it break for > one. Fortunately, both the BIOS and the VGA emulation are all > "software," so we can just fix it easily. Of course, fixing the FPGA > code isn't so bad either. Someone needs to scrounge up a copy of DOS. > That'll be the first thing to try. Then try a recent Linux "text > console only." Then try Windows, then each of the others as it is > convenient. http://www.drdos.com/ $35USD http://www.drdosprojects.de/ DR-DOS/OpenDOS Enhancement Project [[DR-DOS is a popular PC operating system that was originally created and developed up to version 6.0 by Digital Research. After the demise of Digital Research, it was acquired by Novell who released version 7.0 as Novell DOS 7. Despite being a commercial success, Novell lost their interest in the further development of DR-DOS and in 1996 sold it to Caldera, who changed the name to Caldera OpenDOS 7.01 and released the source code of the kernel under an Open Source license.]] http://www.freedos.org/ I'm sure someone could find a msdos 6.x somewhere. > > Also probably needs to be tested on more than one bios -- Award, > > American Megatrends (AMI) and Phoenix etc etc. They all would call > > both the setup code and the int 0x10 interface. For example someone > > mentioned that a bios generated logo was done by changing the fonts, > > so that needs to work. > Most DOS software seems to just write directly to the display memory. > They don't bother with int10. And of course, protected mode stuff > can't call int10. yes vbe has an interface that is callable from protected mode, not sure how often it's used though. If most people just bit bang on the hardware directly then we wouldn't need int 10 except for the odd old dos program. Does award, ami, phoenix etc bit bang directly? or do they use int 10? > The text mode breaks the 32K area into 4K slices. I think there's > like 7 screens and the 8th slice contains the font. I don't recall > for sure. It will be the job of the microcode in HQ to read the font > and use it to render characters correctly. We'll make it not cache > anything; if you change the font, it'll change all the characters on > the display immediately. That seems reasonable, I think most of the older real vga probably didn't use much of any memory besides what what maped to the cpu anyway. and probably did the least amount of work that got the job done. > The commercial entities that want to license our VGA core don't want > to work with open code, so all the stuff you do needs to be original > work so that we can relicense it. They wouldn't even like lgpl2 or later? http://wiki.opengraphics.org./tiki-index.php?page=Subversion+Commit+Policy [[Most software components are released under the X11 license.]] I think lgpl2 by default and letting Traversal relicense as needed would be best. > Since you guys are doing the BIOS, which I'm very happy about, it > should probably also be you guys who do the code for HQ as well. > Petter already developed an assembler for it, and it's in SVN. I'll look into it. _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
