Help Wanted!

Help Wanted!

[Miguel Bolanos]

Greetings to all,

As you may have noticed the project has been stuck for quite a while, i
am looking forward to bring it back to life, but and would like to ask
for some help, obviously coders are very welcome, but also people
willing to help writing docs, and even people looking forward to help us
create a new look for the project website.
Looking forward to hear back from you.

regards

Miguel.

Re: Help Wanted!

[Hans]

Hi Miguel,

I am very happy that you will attempt to do this, I have given up on ELKS 
since even a basic question like why is the mailing list archive link dead 
has remained unanswered.

However, before you start  I think that you need a good set of obtainable 
goals. The reason is simple, you need to get hackers/hobbyist interested in 
the project so that they start contributing. The current target audience(?) 
of old XT/PC type of hardware systems is no longer viable. I might be wrong 
in this respect but I believe you should target embedded and home grown 
hobby systems.  This requires a fundamental change in the development tools 
since BCC is limited to 8086/6809 systems only.

David Given had an idea to use the ACK compiler for ELKS since ACK supports 
a large range of 8 bits microcontrollers, however, I am afraid that by 
adopting ACK we add a huge amount of work and complexity to the project. I 
for one failed to build ELKS on my 64bits system and after a day of hacking 
I gave up since the system was too complex for me (I am a hardware designer 
and not a softie :-).

Why don't you start with a survey, how many people are on this list, what do 
they use ELKS for, what would they like to use ELKS for, who is in charge of 
the website etc..

Regards,
Hans.
http://www.ht-lab.com/


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Miguel Bolanos" <mike@hsol.net>
To: <linux-8086@vger.kernel.org>
Sent: Saturday, September 24, 2005 6:30 AM
Subject: Help Wanted!


> Greetings to all,
>
> As you may have noticed the project has been stuck for quite a while, i
> am looking forward to bring it back to life, but and would like to ask
> for some help, obviously coders are very welcome, but also people
> willing to help writing docs, and even people looking forward to help us
> create a new look for the project website.
> Looking forward to hear back from you.
>
> regards
>
> Miguel.
>
>
> -
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-8086" in
> the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
> More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html 

Re: Help Wanted!

[Rex Walburn]

Hi Hans and Miguel,
3 months back i acquired a laptop with an 80C86 processor, and 640KB
RAM, and tried running ELKS on it. Sometimes while booting I had some
errors, and sometimes I did not. I do  not remember the errors now,
and instead I just used MS DOs (last resort !!) on the computer to see
if it worked.  I did not work on ELKS or on the computer after that.
I am definitely interested in understanding ELKS and contributing something.
I know C, C++ and am familiar with the x86 assembly instruction set. 
I also do know parallel processing, and once was wondering if ELKS can
be made intelligent enough to connect few microcontrollers or 8086
type processors and do parallel processing.  Of course a tcp/ip
implementation would be required.

--
Vikas "Rex" Walburn

On 9/24/05, Hans <hans64@ht-lab.com> wrote:
> Hi Miguel,
>
> I am very happy that you will attempt to do this, I have given up on ELKS
> since even a basic question like why is the mailing list archive link dead
> has remained unanswered.
>
> However, before you start  I think that you need a good set of obtainable
> goals. The reason is simple, you need to get hackers/hobbyist interested in
> the project so that they start contributing. The current target audience(?)
> of old XT/PC type of hardware systems is no longer viable. I might be wrong
> in this respect but I believe you should target embedded and home grown
> hobby systems.  This requires a fundamental change in the development tools
> since BCC is limited to 8086/6809 systems only.
>
> David Given had an idea to use the ACK compiler for ELKS since ACK supports
> a large range of 8 bits microcontrollers, however, I am afraid that by
> adopting ACK we add a huge amount of work and complexity to the project. I
> for one failed to build ELKS on my 64bits system and after a day of hacking
> I gave up since the system was too complex for me (I am a hardware designer
> and not a softie :-).
>
> Why don't you start with a survey, how many people are on this list, what do
> they use ELKS for, what would they like to use ELKS for, who is in charge of
> the website etc..
>
> Regards,
> Hans.
> http://www.ht-lab.com/
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Miguel Bolanos" <mike@hsol.net>
> To: <linux-8086@vger.kernel.org>
> Sent: Saturday, September 24, 2005 6:30 AM
> Subject: Help Wanted!
>
>
> > Greetings to all,
> >
> > As you may have noticed the project has been stuck for quite a while, i
> > am looking forward to bring it back to life, but and would like to ask
> > for some help, obviously coders are very welcome, but also people
> > willing to help writing docs, and even people looking forward to help us
> > create a new look for the project website.
> > Looking forward to hear back from you.
> >
> > regards
> >
> > Miguel.
> >
> >
> > -
> > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-8086" in
> > the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
> > More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
>
> -
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-8086" in
> the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
> More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
>

Re: Help Wanted!

[Hans]

Hi Rex,

Thanks for that, perhaps I am wrong, perhaps old hardware is the only thing 
people are using ELKS for.

Any others, Chrysostomos? you seem to be doing some development, David, 
Harry?

Unfortunately the mailing archive is still giving me a 404 so my 
understanding of the ELKS "world" is just 6 people, surely there must be 
more?

Regards,
Hans.
www.ht-lab.com




----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Rex Walburn" <walburn@gmail.com>
To: <linux-8086@vger.kernel.org>
Sent: Saturday, September 24, 2005 8:43 PM
Subject: Re: Help Wanted!


> Hi Hans and Miguel,
> 3 months back i acquired a laptop with an 80C86 processor, and 640KB
> RAM, and tried running ELKS on it. Sometimes while booting I had some
> errors, and sometimes I did not. I do  not remember the errors now,
> and instead I just used MS DOs (last resort !!) on the computer to see
> if it worked.  I did not work on ELKS or on the computer after that.
> I am definitely interested in understanding ELKS and contributing 
> something.
> I know C, C++ and am familiar with the x86 assembly instruction set.
> I also do know parallel processing, and once was wondering if ELKS can
> be made intelligent enough to connect few microcontrollers or 8086
> type processors and do parallel processing.  Of course a tcp/ip
> implementation would be required.
>
> --
> Vikas "Rex" Walburn
>

Re: Help Wanted!

[Isaque Galdino]

Well guys, I appreciate your efforts to bring elks back to life.
I tried once to use elks in my hp200lx but with no luck at all.
hp200lx still has a lot of users, if you could boot a hp200lx with
elks I guess you would have a lot of guys trying elks for sure.

Unfortunately I couldn't run elks on mine, but hey it's just an idea!

Good luck you all, I'll be watching you! 8)

On 9/27/05, Hans <hans64@ht-lab.com> wrote:
> Hi Rex,
>
> Thanks for that, perhaps I am wrong, perhaps old hardware is the only thing
> people are using ELKS for.
>
> Any others, Chrysostomos? you seem to be doing some development, David,
> Harry?
>
> Unfortunately the mailing archive is still giving me a 404 so my
> understanding of the ELKS "world" is just 6 people, surely there must be
> more?
>
> Regards,
> Hans.
> www.ht-lab.com
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Rex Walburn" <walburn@gmail.com>
> To: <linux-8086@vger.kernel.org>
> Sent: Saturday, September 24, 2005 8:43 PM
> Subject: Re: Help Wanted!
>
>
> > Hi Hans and Miguel,
> > 3 months back i acquired a laptop with an 80C86 processor, and 640KB
> > RAM, and tried running ELKS on it. Sometimes while booting I had some
> > errors, and sometimes I did not. I do  not remember the errors now,
> > and instead I just used MS DOs (last resort !!) on the computer to see
> > if it worked.  I did not work on ELKS or on the computer after that.
> > I am definitely interested in understanding ELKS and contributing
> > something.
> > I know C, C++ and am familiar with the x86 assembly instruction set.
> > I also do know parallel processing, and once was wondering if ELKS can
> > be made intelligent enough to connect few microcontrollers or 8086
> > type processors and do parallel processing.  Of course a tcp/ip
> > implementation would be required.
> >
> > --
> > Vikas "Rex" Walburn
> >
>
> -
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-8086" in
> the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
> More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
>


--
Isaque Galdino
"Beat to fit, paint to match..."

Re: Help Wanted!

[Dan Olson]

Well, I've been on the mailing list since... the '90s some time I guess. 
My origional thinking is that it'd be cool to have a Linux like system on 
an XT or 286, I have a collection of old systems and it'd be neat to use 
ELKS on them.  I finally was able to get a DOS packet driver and a program 
called Minuet working on my XT and NCSA telnet/ftp on my 286, both using 
3Com network cards, so I hate to say but ELKS would really need that 
functionality to be useful to me on the old machines.  Building an 8088 or 
8086 system would be neat to do too but at this point I don't really think 
I'll be doing that.

 	Dan


On Tue, 27 Sep 2005, Hans wrote:

> Hi Rex,
>
> Thanks for that, perhaps I am wrong, perhaps old hardware is the only thing 
> people are using ELKS for.
>
> Any others, Chrysostomos? you seem to be doing some development, David, 
> Harry?
>
> Unfortunately the mailing archive is still giving me a 404 so my 
> understanding of the ELKS "world" is just 6 people, surely there must be 
> more?
>
> Regards,
> Hans.
> www.ht-lab.com
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Rex Walburn" <walburn@gmail.com>
> To: <linux-8086@vger.kernel.org>
> Sent: Saturday, September 24, 2005 8:43 PM
> Subject: Re: Help Wanted!
>
>
>> Hi Hans and Miguel,
>> 3 months back i acquired a laptop with an 80C86 processor, and 640KB
>> RAM, and tried running ELKS on it. Sometimes while booting I had some
>> errors, and sometimes I did not. I do  not remember the errors now,
>> and instead I just used MS DOs (last resort !!) on the computer to see
>> if it worked.  I did not work on ELKS or on the computer after that.
>> I am definitely interested in understanding ELKS and contributing 
>> something.
>> I know C, C++ and am familiar with the x86 assembly instruction set.
>> I also do know parallel processing, and once was wondering if ELKS can
>> be made intelligent enough to connect few microcontrollers or 8086
>> type processors and do parallel processing.  Of course a tcp/ip
>> implementation would be required.
>> 
>> --
>> Vikas "Rex" Walburn
>> 
>
> -
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-8086" in
> the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
> More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
>

Re: Help Wanted!

[David Given]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1675 bytes --]

On Tuesday 27 September 2005 20:10, Isaque Galdino wrote:
> Well guys, I appreciate your efforts to bring elks back to life.
> I tried once to use elks in my hp200lx but with no luck at all.
> hp200lx still has a lot of users, if you could boot a hp200lx with
> elks I guess you would have a lot of guys trying elks for sure.

Have you tried ELKS' arch-rival, Minix? I'm not sure if Minix 2 will run on 
the i86, but Minix 1.5 certainly does, and works reasonably well.

The big trouble with ELKS is that it only really runs on i86 machines, and 
these are a right pain to deal with --- it's not just that they're really 
old, decrepit machines which cost more in electricity to run than a pocket 
calculator a thousand times more powerful does today, it's that no two are 
the same. Standards were pretty fuzzy in those days, and there's a huge 
variety of different kinds of hardware that needs supporting. Actually making 
ELKS work reliably would be a rather large undertaking just for test 
purposes...

(DOS gets away with it because, basically, DOS is crap. It relies on the BIOS 
to do a lot of the work, which ELKS can't really do. Minix manages a bit 
better but it's a bit picky on the kinds of hardware it'll support for just 
this reason.)

Can ELKS be ported to *other* architectures that i86? Would it be feasible to 
use it on a modern, flat architecture like ARM?

-- 
+- David Given --McQ-+ "Hydrogen fusion, the sun makes shine
|  dg@cowlark.com    | Vascular pressure makes the ivy twine.
| (dg@tao-group.com) | Because of Rayleigh, the sky's so blue.
+- www.cowlark.com --+ Hormonal fixation is why I love you." --- Zarf


[-- Attachment #2: Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 189 bytes --]

Re: Help Wanted!

[Dan Olson]

> The big trouble with ELKS is that it only really runs on i86 machines, and
> these are a right pain to deal with --- it's not just that they're really
> old, decrepit machines which cost more in electricity to run than a pocket
> calculator a thousand times more powerful does today, it's that no two are
> the same. Standards were pretty fuzzy in those days, and there's a huge
> variety of different kinds of hardware that needs supporting. Actually making
> ELKS work reliably would be a rather large undertaking just for test
> purposes...

I assume you're talking about PCs based on the 8088/8086, as I'm sure new 
machines could be built using the processor as well.  There were 
standards... but a lot of hardware that came with some sort of DOS driver 
to make it work (CD-ROMs, tape drives, and network cards come to mind).

> (DOS gets away with it because, basically, DOS is crap. It relies on the BIOS
> to do a lot of the work, which ELKS can't really do. Minix manages a bit
> better but it's a bit picky on the kinds of hardware it'll support for just
> this reason.)

I know the BIOS is sometimes lacking for what we're trying to do, but DOS 
isn't crap for reling on it, that's the way the machine was designed, and 
the idea isn't that bad at all, as hardware would have it's own BIOS and 
the OS doesn't need to support everything ever built.  Plus, now we have 
hindsight, I mean, we can choose to support only two or three network 
cards, the most popular hard drive controllers (Don't know how they work 
with the BIOS bypassed), and things of that nature.  If you don't have the 
supported hardware, you'd have to go to eBay and buy it :)

> Can ELKS be ported to *other* architectures that i86? Would it be feasible to
> use it on a modern, flat architecture like ARM?

I suppose at some point it would be easier to start from scratch, but I'm 
sure some porting could be done.

 	Dan

Re: Help Wanted!

[Hans]

>(DOS gets away with it because, basically, DOS is crap. It relies on the 
>BIOS
>to do a lot of the work, which ELKS can't really do.

Why not?

I actually like the BIOS :-)  since it is the BIOS which enables me to write 
a debug style monitor which runs on my FPGA board and with very minor 
modifications on my 64bits desktop. I actually believe that the success of 
ELKS relies on the definition of an easy to port BIOS/HAL layer. I would 
even suggest that we define a standard set of BIOS calls.  If your processor 
doesn't support software interrupt then perhaps a CALL instruction would 
work?

>Can ELKS be ported to *other* architectures that i86? Would it be feasible 
>to
>use it on a modern, flat architecture like ARM?

I assume with flat you are referring to a segment/offset style of 
architecture, I haven't check the ELKS code in any detail but I assume this 
issue can easily be resolved?

I would forget about ARM since they have a very good uCLinux port and gcc 
support.

Regards,
Hans
www.ht-lab.com




-- 
+- David Given --McQ-+ "Hydrogen fusion, the sun makes shine
|  dg@cowlark.com    | Vascular pressure makes the ivy twine.
| (dg@tao-group.com) | Because of Rayleigh, the sky's so blue.
+- www.cowlark.com --+ Hormonal fixation is why I love you." --- Zarf
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Given" <dg@cowlark.com>
To: <linux-8086@vger.kernel.org>
Sent: Tuesday, September 27, 2005 9:13 PM
Subject: Re: Help Wanted!

Re: Help Wanted!

[David Given]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1523 bytes --]

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 --+ 


[-- Attachment #2: Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 189 bytes --]

Re: Help Wanted!

[Rex Walburn]

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 --+
>
>
>
>

Re: Help Wanted!

[jb1]

On Tue, 27 Sep 2005, Hans wrote:

> Hi Rex,
> 
> Thanks for that, perhaps I am wrong, perhaps old hardware is the only thing 
> people are using ELKS for.
> 
> Any others, Chrysostomos? you seem to be doing some development, David, 
> Harry?

I'm still "lurking", but haven't had time to do anything serious with 
ELKS since getting it running on a Compaq Portable II.

I have some XT, 286 and stripped-down 386 machines I'd like to use as
firewalls, printer servers, file servers, etc., but that would require
ethernet capability. National Semiconductor has an application note with
8086 assembly code for the DP8390, which would probably work with
NE1000/NE2000 ethernet cards. The application note is:
	AN-874
	Writing Drivers for the DP8390 NIC Family of Ethernet Controllers
	National Semiconductor
	Application Note 874
	July 1993
National's AN-937 (Loopback Diagnostics Using the DP8390/901/902/905) has
some C code that might be helpful. This is only the lowest-level hardware
stuff, and would require a great deal more to work with a real ethernet
card, but maybe the rest could be translated from Linux. If Harry's still
out there, maybe he could help.


> Unfortunately the mailing archive is still giving me a 404 so my 
> understanding of the ELKS "world" is just 6 people, surely there must be 
> more?

I, too, was wondering what happened to the mailing list archive.

Re: Help Wanted!

[Alexander van Heukelum]

On Fri, 23 Sep 2005 23:30:24 -0600
 Miguel Bolanos <mike@hsol.net> wrote:
>Greetings to all,
>
>As you may have noticed the project has been stuck for quite a while, i
>am looking forward to bring it back to life, but and would like to ask
>for some help, obviously coders are very welcome, but also people
>willing to help writing docs, and even people looking forward to help us
>create a new look for the project website.
>Looking forward to hear back from you.

Hi!

I don't think I will be of much help, but the ELKS project has
interested me enough to keep myself subscribed to the list
(and the list hasn't received enough spam to annoy me ;) ) My
_personal_ opinion is that ELKS as it stands (8086-specific)
will never have enough support to become an interesting 
project. Supporting more architectures means that there is 
the need for a flexible compiler, and very portable code.

I think portable code is equivalent to "gcc-like" in this case, but 
gcc itself seems far too complex to ever work in a "small" 
environment. The TinyCC [1] compiler comes close, and already 
has non-i386 code generators. It lacks a pure 8086 generator, 
however. I also think that the compiler should implement a 32
bit int (and in fact adhere to the limits as given in susv3 [2]). 
That way there could be more code-sharing with other "modern"
projects, in particular dietlibc, uClibc, Busybox.

Anyhow: Good Luck :)

btw. Who is the maintainer of this list?
Majordomo says:
>>>>> info linux-8086
>Linux on 8086 -- non-MMU, very small address spaces
>
>Archives:
>  http://www.geocrawler.com/lists/3/Linux/
>>>>> who linux-8086
>**** Command disabled.

regards,
    Alexander

[1] http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/tcc/
[2] http://unix.org

>regards
>
>Miguel.
>
>-
>To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-8086" in
>the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
>More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html

Re: Help Wanted!

[Javier Sedano]

Hi there,

David Given wrote:
> 
> (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.)
> 

	I'm running Minix 2.0.2 on both a 8088 and 80286 (with 640k). With 
TCP/IP enabled, there is RAM space for only a couple of extra processes 
(I can't remember the exact amount; I mean "extra" as appart from the 
minimal getty's, sh's and so on), so you can not even type "make", since 
if spawn some extra subprocesses (compiler, linker,...) and runs out of 
memory.
	Minix 2.0.3 and 2.0.4 are supposed to swap to disk, but are said to be 
too large to run on 640k.
	

-- 
Javier Sedano Jarillo: javier.sedano@agora-2000.com
Agora Systems, S.A.
C/Aravaca 12
E-28040 Madrid (Spain)
Tel.: +34 676 48 29 55
Tel.: +34 91 533 58 57
Fax.: +34 91 534 84 77
--------
< Se alquila este espacio para Publicidad. Interesados preguntar Aqui >

Re: Help Wanted!

[Gregg C Levine]

Hello from Gregg C Levine
I, as well, have stayed with this group for the same reasons. I also have
here a Compaq Portable as well.
It is a Portable III.

Now as to your Nat Semi, applications note, have you actually implemented
it? It happens I have the parts here, probably have the note as well.

Incidentally has anyone tried building the current ELKS source code using
today's Linux toolchain, and BCC?
---
Gregg C Levine
obiwanthejediknight@worldnet.att.net

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <jb1@btstream.com>
To: "Hans" <hans64@ht-lab.com>
Cc: "Rex Walburn" <walburn@gmail.com>; <linux-8086@vger.kernel.org>
Sent: Wednesday, September 28, 2005 5:29 AM
Subject: Re: Help Wanted!


> On Tue, 27 Sep 2005, Hans wrote:
>
> > Hi Rex,
> >
> > Thanks for that, perhaps I am wrong, perhaps old hardware is the only
thing
> > people are using ELKS for.
> >
> > Any others, Chrysostomos? you seem to be doing some development, David,
> > Harry?
>
> I'm still "lurking", but haven't had time to do anything serious with
> ELKS since getting it running on a Compaq Portable II.
>
> I have some XT, 286 and stripped-down 386 machines I'd like to use as
> firewalls, printer servers, file servers, etc., but that would require
> ethernet capability. National Semiconductor has an application note with
> 8086 assembly code for the DP8390, which would probably work with
> NE1000/NE2000 ethernet cards. The application note is:
> AN-874
> Writing Drivers for the DP8390 NIC Family of Ethernet Controllers
> National Semiconductor
> Application Note 874
> July 1993
> National's AN-937 (Loopback Diagnostics Using the DP8390/901/902/905) has
> some C code that might be helpful. This is only the lowest-level hardware
> stuff, and would require a great deal more to work with a real ethernet
> card, but maybe the rest could be translated from Linux. If Harry's still
> out there, maybe he could help.
>
>
> > Unfortunately the mailing archive is still giving me a 404 so my
> > understanding of the ELKS "world" is just 6 people, surely there must be
> > more?
>
> I, too, was wondering what happened to the mailing list archive.
>
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Re: Help Wanted!

[hansydelm]

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.

Ah, yes, you are right, I forgot about the reentrant issue. I am obviously keen on a thin easy to implement layer (aren't we all :-) and the BIOS looks like a good start, but I do agree that we might need to address this issue at some stage. 

I do like the fact that ELKS can be used on a low-memory systems, according to the FAQ you still need at least 512Kbyte, is this true? Although you can now get FPGA's with 1MByte of embedded memory these devices are still quite expensive.   

Regards,
Hans
www.ht-lab.com

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Re: Help Wanted!

[hansydelm]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Rex Walburn" <walburn@gmail.com>
To: "David Given" <dg@cowlark.com>; "Hans" <hans64@ht-lab.com>
Cc: <linux-8086@vger.kernel.org>
Sent: Wednesday, September 28, 2005 3:32 AM
Subject: Re: Help Wanted!

> 
> 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. 

Having a low memory footprint Linux type of OS running on your obsolete 8/16 bits microcontroller is quite cool, well at least to me :-) 

> 
> So what's the plan ?

Don't know, over to Miguel since he started the thread.

I am happy to contribute but I am not a software engineer, also building an XT on an FPGA is taking all my spare time. I am currently finishing off an 8259 and 8254 (the latter one is giving me some issue given the multiple clock domain issue). 

Regards,
Hans
www.ht-lab.com

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Re: Help Wanted!

[jb1]

On Wed, 28 Sep 2005, Gregg C Levine wrote:

> Hello from Gregg C Levine
 ...

> Now as to your Nat Semi, applications note, have you actually implemented
> it? It happens I have the parts here, probably have the note as well.

No, I didn't.

By the way, note that the routine "pkt_recv_rt" (page 12 of AN-874.PDF)
*ends* with the line:
	NICtoPC
and the routine "ring_ovfl" *contains* an identical line (on page 13 of 
AN874.PDF). I presume that these are macros that translate to:
	call	_NICtoPC
which is a subroutine on page 9 of AN-874.PDF.

I also suspect that the label "Writing_Word:" in _NICtoPC should be 
"Reading_Word:" (page 9 of AN-874.PDF), that the "seq" in:
	mov	es,seq recv_pc_buff
should be "seg" (in "pkt_recv_rt", page 12 of AN-874.PDF), and that 
"_INTERRUPTSTATUS" in:
	mov dx,_INTERRUPTSTATUS
should be "INTERRUPTSTATUS" (in ring_ovfl, page 12 of AN-874.PDF).

In addition to the application notes I mention previously (AN-874 and 
AN-937), you might also want to look at two other documents I found 
online --
  AN-475.PDF, "DP8390 Network Interface Controller: An Introductory Guide"
and
  DP8390D.pdf, "DP8390D/NS32490D NIC Network Interface Controller"
The latter is a 56-page datasheet.