[ECOS] How to start ReBoot/eCos app from DOS or as BIOS extension?

Christian Axbrink Christian.Axbrink@hb.se
Thu Sep 18 10:54:00 GMT 2003


Hello everyone.

I need to start RedBoot on a number of embedded i386 boards. The BIOS on these cards resides in ROM. There is 2 MB of flash memory, meant to be used either for BIOS extensions or for a (very!) non-standard DOS filesystem, which patently refuses to boot anything else than DOS.
In our application, lack of physical space prohibits the use of floppy disks as boot media.

With eCos 1.3, we used Roman Khvatov's DOS loaders to start eCos applications from DOS and thus circumventing this problem.

Khvatov's utilities does however not seem to work with eCos 2.0. Therefore I now have the following questions,  to which I have not found any clear answer in the eCos mailing lists:

1. Is there some available equivalent of Khvatov's DOS-to-eCos utilities that are compatible with eCos 2.0?
2. Can the experimental ROM target (or some other target) of RedBoot for i386 be directly used as a BIOS extension?
3. If not, can the RedBoot ROM target be easily converted to a BIOS extension?
4. If none of the above works, can some RedBoot binary be started by renaming/converting it to some executable the BIOS will attempt to read from disk (typically IBMBIO.COM or IBMDOS.COM)?


Greetings

Christian Axbrink - christian.axbrink@hb.se
Robotics Research Laboratory
University College of Borås, Sweden

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