Re: Help Wanted!

[Rex Walburn <walburn@gmail.com>]

Hi All
I have a few points to make

1) The BIOS of 8086/8088 systems and the earlier x86 systems were very
basic and used extremely less memory. To make ELKS depend on the BIOS
would not be a good move, in any case.
2) Minix requires atleast 1MB RAM or even more to actually run. But
for those people who would wanna use ELKS for microcontroller
programming or 8086 processor programming  and for systems that use
these. Such systems (either old hardware or home-brewed hardware or
FPGA systems etc.) have limited memory usage they can support.
Something of the order of 640KB or so. This is where ELKS can score
over Minix, because the memory required is much less.
3) As far as supporting different architectures goes, one architecture
which is more common among microcontrollers/small scale processors
(either Motorola 6800.. or 8086 ) can be chosen. Finally, as high
level programmers we do know that in the end it will just be a matter
of modifying a few instructions.

And Hans, people will use ELKS more if it works properly according to
their requirements. There are always crazy guys out there who would
love to use it given the opportunity. And who knows even if few of us
work together and get something done, people doing embedded systems
could start using ELKS because of low memory capabilities.

So what's the plan ?

--
Vikas "Rex" Walburn

On 9/27/05, David Given <dg@cowlark.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday 27 September 2005 22:06, Hans wrote:
> [...]
> > Why not?
>
> The short answer is because the BIOS is not reentrant, which means it can only
> do one thing at a time. Remember the bad old days when accessing the floppy
> disk would make the system freeze? That's the BIOS' fault.
>
> Also, the BIOS is *extremely* basic. The BIOS elevator algorithms for MFM hard
> disks sucked hugely; I once ran big Linux on a 386 with an MFM drive, and was
> amazed at just how much faster Linux' disk access was, simply because it was
> scheduling the I/O transfers more efficiently. I'm not even sure the BIOS
> does DMA. Remember that the B stands for Basic...
>
> Now, it *might* be possible to multitask during a BIOS call provided only one
> task was accessing the BIOS at any time. You still wouldn't be able to, e.g.,
> access the hard disk while the floppy drive was in use, but at least the
> system shouldn't just freeze.
>
> [...]
> > I would forget about ARM since they have a very good uCLinux port and gcc
> > support.
>
> Yeah, but uCLinux is still very large compared to an ELKS kernel.
>
> (BTW, someone has told me via email that they have Minix 2 running on a i86
> machine, but the TCP/IP stack tends to eat most of the available memory. So
> it does actually work.)
>
> --
> +- David Given --McQ-+ "Information wants to be free, but my mail client
> |  dg@cowlark.com    | does not want to be chock-full of herbal pot
> | (dg@tao-group.com) | alternative spam." --- Sant Lupus on Slashdot
> +- www.cowlark.com --+
>
>
>
>