Messages in this thread | | | From | (Alan Cox) | Subject | Re: Linux on 386 EX SBC Card | Date | Sun, 18 Oct 1998 19:46:07 +0100 (BST) |
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> I'm about to buy a 386 EX SBC Card from universal developers > (www.universal-developers.com). > This card has a Intel 386EX with 2Mbytes DRAM, 2 serial ports, > 1 paralele port, 1 interupts controler, 1 timer, 1 Watchdog timer > 1Mbytes flash PROM with BIOS and DOS in it. > > Do you think I could run linux on it ?
It would appear so
> Do I need the BIOS, or can Linux do all initialisation alone ? > Is there a driver to access ROM as a block device ? If not can I use > /dev/rom device MAJOR defined in devices.txt for my driver?
There are some obvious devices to modify to run as /dev/rom, and some equivalent to ROM ram disks around. You can use what majors you like internally too.
As to the BIOS. Linux needs to be loaded and to be passed a block of boot time information giving things like the presence of APM, the ram size etc. So at minimum you need a loader to initialise the hardware dump the kernel into RAM set up the tables and run it. In theory you can run the kernel image from ROM although 2.0.x might need a couple of small changes where it writes to its constant strings.
The best starting point is to read arch/i386/kernel/head.S and see if you can replace the calls it makes to the bios with your own hard coded (or otherwise) data.
Mail me if you get stuck
Alan
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