Re: Re: [ECOS] i386 rom image

["Talia Sound and Vision P/L" <jtalia at ozemail dot com dot au>]

Our platform is an AMPRO PC-104 Coremodule, which has a socket for an EPROM.
I was thinking of leaving the BIOS to do the hardware initialization and use
the BIOS extension facility (which is run after initialization) to run a
little bootloader (located at the start of the EPROM) which will copy the
application/eCos code (also in the EPROM) to RAM and then run it. Will this
work? What changes are needed in the linker script?
Thanks
Ranj W.


>    Ranj> Our system is Linux host, i386 target. First application has
>    Ranj> been debugged and is working OK. How do we go about making a
>    Ranj> rom image (binary, not ELF) file, for using on a programmer?
>    Ranj> EPROM will be at 0xD0000. RAM at usual PC location. Do we
>    Ranj> have to change target.ld?
>
>As far as I am aware nobody has yet provided ROM bootstrap support for
>the i386 port. On ports where ROM bootstrap is provided the
>configuration option CYG_HAL_STARTUP lists "ROM" as a legal value, and
>this is not the case for i386/PC.
>
>There are two main pieces of work that will be needed. The linker
>script will indeed have to be modified, you can have a look at some of
>the other HALs to find out what is involved. Some additional
>information can be found in the HAL section of the reference guide.
>More importantly you will need to worry about the startup code. The
>existing startups, RAM and FLOPPY, operate in an environment where
>much hardware initialization has already happened courtesy of the
>BIOS. For a ROM bootstrap such initialization will have to be done the
>hard way, and appropriate code will need to be added the HAL startup.
>
>Bart Veer // eCos net maintainer
>