Re: [ECOS] Re: A suitable x86 based board

[Frank Pagliughi <fpagliughi@mindspring.com>]

R. Vamshi Krishna wrote:

> Grant Edwards wrote:
>
>> In gmane.os.ecos.general, you wrote:
>>
>>  
>>
>>> Yeah PC Motherboard is also fine. But what I wanted was that
>>> is it possible to do away with a floppy drive totally ?
>>>   
>>
>>
>> Just don't install one?  About half of my Linux boxes don't
>> have floppy disk drives.
>>
>>  
>>
>>> We have hard-disk/usb pen drive for logging data .. And we
>>> have ideflash.
>>>   
>>
>>
>> OK.
>>
>>  
>>
>>> Is it possible to have the application on the
>>> hard-drive/usb-pen drive /flash such that manual loading can
>>> be done away with.
>>>   
>>
>>
>> I don't understand teh question.  Assuming it _is_ a question.
>>  
>>
> What I meant was that so far with i386 PC as target I had been booting 
> using FLOPPY + Redboot.
>
> Can I do away with the floppy drive and boot the pc/board and load the 
> application using ideflash and/or
> usb pendrive ??
> -- Vamshi
>
>
Oops, I almost forgot....

There's another way to boot eCos applications on an i386/PC: from DOS!

There's an open-source DOS extender that's part of the OSLib project, by 
Luca Abeni. It's Multiboot compliant, so it can launch eCos executables 
if they're compiled correctly. It's called eXtender, and can be found at:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=14468&package_id=13845

The idea I tried is not to use the extender to get in and out of DOS, 
but to boot into eCos at power-up and never return. I haven't done too 
much with it, but initial tests have worked well. I was mainly trying to 
get around the headaches of using eCos from the DiskOnChip.

To use it, just compile eCos for GRUB startup type and select "Load into 
higher memory" (CYGHWR_HAL_I386_PC_LOAD_HIGH -> true). This will create 
a Multiboot compliant application and place it in a suitable memory area 
for the extender. (Note that there's a recent patch to eCos to allow you 
to use Load High with GRUB startup for just this purpose).

Then load something like DOS, RomDOS, or FreeDOS onto the DiskOnChip and 
make an autoexec.bat file that launches your eCos app, using the extender.

Frank Pagliughi


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