>> 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
Can Linux run in only 2M of RAM? I've always needed more than that,
and the least I've managed with so far is 6M to install, and 3.5M to
run the installed system, but the latter was with a RamDisk to take
the strain...
>> 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
Given that there's enough RAM, I'd see nothing wrong with your advice,
but I'm no expert on these things...
Best wishes from Riley.
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