Re: Some words of encouragement

Brad Normand
2012-02-25T05:12:28Z

>> Some method to transfer data to/from FAT12.
>
> Planned for the future, for sure. The FAT filesystem options in ELKS were
> "unimplemented features" so I stripped them out of the build process
> entirely until a driver actually exists.

It was mostly an idea for me to get around modifying my fat12 boot
sector into a minixfs bootsector. But if minixfs is better for a root
filesystem then maybe that's what I should do anyway.

> The problem with EMS code is that ALL EMS boards are different, and the LIM
> EMS specification is useless since it relies on the vendor-supplied DOS
> driver to work.

Well, it could be BIOS supplied (perhaps an option ROM), or otherwise
loaded before ELKS (eg, into high conventional memory). The API
doesn't rely on DOS to my knowledge. My system uses a mostly RAM
resident BIOS right now so all those scenarios would be about
equivalent. Anyway, that's a way down the road thing, but in case
there were design decisions now that could impact it, I figured I'd
throw in my vote.

> Right now, we need to fix the most egregious bugs in the code, specifically
> the ones that cause the system to hang, lock up, get stuck at a looping
> "login:" or other crashy behavior. I suspect that bcc is partially
> responsible for some of these problems, given that it generates lackluster
> code and the bcc source itself is very poorly documented, making changes to
> it dicey. Once again, I would love to switch compilers, but while SDCC is
> apparently the most promising option, it also doesn't support the 8086
> (unless I missed something when I looked at it), so that's a dead end unless
> someone wants to port SDCC to 8086 first. I'm thinking that the only real
> solution is going to be to either massively retool bcc, or to write a
> compiler. I'm starting to see why ELKS was abandoned; few people exist that
> want to do these big jobs AND possess the requisite experience to actually
> do it.

Maybe I should start looking at SDCC and see how hard it is to get
into. I'd be a little out of my comfort zone though, I'm mostly just
used to java and 8086/PIC assembly. But maybe it won't be as bad as I
expect. If I want to experiment with bizarre segmentation schemes,
there will probably be a lot of do-it-yourself involved.