On Sun, Oct 18, 1998 at 05:09:57PM +0100, christophe leroy wrote:
> 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.
>
this is for what ? embeded controlers ?
> Do you think I could run linux on it ?
can't see why not ... :)
> Do I need the BIOS, or can Linux do all initialisation alone ?
Usually Linux uses the BIOS to boot (via lilo or some other thing) and to do
some basic hardware detection. Since your hardware won't change you can
hardcode it into the kernel. Also 1M ROM is large enough to fin an
uncompressed kernel so you might do a autobooted kernel hack ehhe :)
Now remember you will run some programs on it too no ? :)
> 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?
>
Hum there is a a ROM fs developed by the PDA port people i think. You might
want to look into that.
Some time ago i asked around and the last kernels to run on such tight
memory where 1.0. I was told someone did a patch for 2.0 to boot on a
ridiculous amount of RAM.
I would try to keep the kernel on ROM. That can be achieve with some
sensible linker map .. to make the kernel live well with text on ROM and
data on ROM.
What exactly are you going to do with linux on this ? I'm curious eheh :)
Does this have any way of talking to the world other then serial/parallel ?
- --
Carlos Morgado - l39801@alfa.ist.utl.pt - http://alfa.ist.utl.pt/~c39801
PGP Key fingerprint = 43 BF 53 98 EB 32 F5 17 9E EB 77 1F 57 8C C6 83
[sig in cold storement]
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: 2.6.3i
Charset: noconv
iQCVAwUBNiqU9oewijNBLgpJAQFAxAQAobi7rpeTBo/tx7LzIOGBD9bi5aW+vzwG
Kvr2Lu4DDMkwBts6bnGk3gAVx6sxZNk6lZwDN+kDZugshUVB4mxOhmFF4A4lAiww
3d7NkTMduk1iwlz4KUCF3drQg885o38ZBMxFsAGHm1p+E5OJrJkHZHSQwibsfpTi
MDCmmMIz6vg=
=OFsY
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/