(no subject)

[David Eagle USG <eagle@zk3.dec.com> writes:]

>"Would we be able to write the kernel of VSTa into FLASH BIOS,
>and thus boot amazingly fast?" "Should I make it a priority
>to have FLASH BIOS as a component of the new system I am buying?"

Well, I can get DOS to boot in about 6 seconds from a warm boot and about
12 from cold (RAM test disabled, no config.sys and empty autoexec.bat of
course). VSTa takes about 10 seconds after that. I guess if you're stuck
with a BIOS which is really poky it might pay off.

>Also, I would appreciate comments on whether I could be hurt by
>opting to save $150 by going with the Cyrix 486DLC/40 instead of
>the Intel 486SX25.

I have personally run VSTa on a 386, 486SX, and 486DX2 66 Mhz. I've never
heard of anybody running on a Cyrix. From all accounts, it's supposed to be
quite compatible--take a standalone boot floppy down to the store and give
it a spin! If the standalone boot can come up, ID keyboard/screen/disk, then
I'd expect that it's fine.

Even if it didn't boot right off, source is available and I'd be interested
in merging back any changes which fixed running with a Cyrix part (without
breaking an Intel part, preferably... :->).

                                                        Andy

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From: Dave Hudson <dave@humbug.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Linux based build etc.
To: vsta@cisco.com
Date: Sun, 2 Jan 1994 00:17:51 +0000 (GMT)
In-Reply-To: <9312202344.AA00460@europa.nsis.cl.nec.co.jp> from "Gavin Thomas Nicol" at Dec 21, 93 08:44:18 am
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Gavin Thomas Nicol wrote (about the 20th December 1993):
>
> It's very good to see people with a working build under Linux. One
> other thing that might be worth looking at is creating a VSTa image
> that could be written to floppy. I did do some work on it, and
> basically all you have to do is follow what boot.exe does, but instead
> of writing to memory, write to disk. This will build up a memory
> image.
>
> Of course, a boot block, and initialization code need to be tacked
> onto the front of the image, but they're generally trivial.
>

Well I've just got the code to do exactly this working. It requires the
Linux as86/ld86 pair to build the bootsector and setup code and currently
uses a couple of utilities under Linux to make a loadable image. The code I
have is as follows:

combine: reads a "boot.lst" type file and creates a file containing the
        VSTa kernel and boot tasks

bootsect: a floppy diskette bootstrap loader (uses PC BIOS int 0x13 calls).

setup: initialises descriptor/page tables, switches to protected mode and
        starts VSTa proper. (This is independent of the bootsector code so
        it can be used when I get an HDD loader working as well)

build: combines the output of all of the above into an image that can be
        "dd"'d to a diskette.

Sometime I'd like to write a more generalised boot loader that would allow
multiple boot configs to be selected, and that would hopefully let MS-DOS be
booted as well. I suspect that Werner Almesberger's LILO for Linux would be
a good starting place, but I'd like to get some work done on bitblt and port
Werner's dosfsck and my mkdosfs code first :-)

If you're interested I can mail the code to you.

Happy New Year,

Dave
Received on Wed Dec 29 14:56:43 1993