From owner-freebsd-small Fri Jun 26 12:44:56 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id MAA15607 for freebsd-small-outgoing; Fri, 26 Jun 1998 12:44:56 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-small@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from korin.warman.org.pl (korin.nask.waw.pl [148.81.160.10]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id MAA15448 for ; Fri, 26 Jun 1998 12:44:06 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from abial@nask.pl) Received: from localhost (abial@localhost) by korin.warman.org.pl (8.8.8/8.8.5) with SMTP id VAA01990; Fri, 26 Jun 1998 21:46:28 +0200 (CEST) X-Authentication-Warning: korin.warman.org.pl: abial owned process doing -bs Date: Fri, 26 Jun 1998 21:46:28 +0200 (CEST) From: Andrzej Bialecki X-Sender: abial@korin.warman.org.pl To: Mike Smith cc: freebsd-small@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Flashes and BIOS (was Re: I'm back.) In-Reply-To: <199806261729.KAA07996@antipodes.cdrom.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-small@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Fri, 26 Jun 1998, Mike Smith wrote: > > * I just received a flash disk (16MB, M-Systems, ISA card), thanks to > > Goran Hasse of Raditex, SE - I'll be experimenting with it till it starts > > working... :-) (i.e. I want to boot from it, and somehow access it to > > store the config data). I also plan to read the docs about Linux > > implementation of Flash Filesystem (romfs). Any pointers appreciated! > > If this card has an on-board BIOS, I would be more than happy to help > you implement a VM86-based BIOS-disk driver on -current. We have > everything in place to make this pretty easy. Yes, yes!!! That was what I also intended to pursue. You see, it has it's own BIOS which makes it accessible from DOS as an IDE drive. There is a driver for QNX, but (obviously) binary only. From the h/w point of view the card is seen through a 10kB memory region (no IO adresses). As I said I just received it today, plugged it into a spare machine and verified that it works, nothing more (in fact, I even booted FreeBSD from it, but of course couldn't mount root). Its BIOS hooks up normal int13, I think... so yes, if we could call its BIOS under FreeBSD, this should just work as expected (modulo some unexpectancies :-). I have to display my total ignorance here: I'm not sure what happens to the interrupt vectors once FreeBSD is booted - are they stored somewhere? are they changed at all? I kind of vaguely remember them being located somewhere near the 0:0 right after the POST completes (in real mode, just after startup). What happens to them when freebsd switches to protected mode? Is this memory area used at all? etc, etc... As for the driver: I'm totally ignorant in writing device drivers (and anything that must reside in kernel) - all I did thus far was to run the scripts in /usr/share/examples, and look at the code they produced... but I'm determined to learn, and code what I can. :-) > > One thing that should be discussed before this is the use of > DEVFS/SLICE > DEVFS should not be used in 2.2, and SLICE isn't there at all. For a > 3.0-based PicoBSD, it's ideal. Well, we might bifurcate the types further... into {dial,net,isp}/{devfs,nodevfs} but this starts to be messy... Perhaps I'll come up with a feature-level configurator instead of defining separate types with their own hierarchies... but this complicates calculations of MFS sizes... Andrzej Bialecki --------------------+--------------------------------------------------------- abial@nask.pl | if(halt_per_mth > 0) { fetch("http://www.freebsd.org") } Research & Academic | "Be open-minded, but don't let your brains to fall out." Network in Poland | All of the above (and more) is just my personal opinion. --------------------+--------------------------------------------------------- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-small" in the body of the message