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jezze
could Fudge fit on a floppy?
Even today the floppies are still being used, for example - as virtual floppies inside the coreboot open source BIOS. Just imagine: your wonderful OS could be a part of someone's BIOS build! (for coreboot supported motherboard, maybe you have or could get one - see https://www.coreboot.org/Supported_Motherboards )
If you already have a coreboot-supported motherboard, or a real chance to get one, - wouldn't it be cool to be able to launch your own OS straight from the BIOS chip? ;) With one simple command its possible to add any floppy to coreboot BIOS build - and then you see it as a boot entry! Multiple floppies could be added this way (as long as you have enough space left inside the BIOS flash chip, luckily LZMA compression could be used for the stored floppies to reduce their occupied size)
I have thought about adding fudge as a OS payload for coreboot before and yeah I think it would work (the size needed would be more like 2 floppies rather than one) but I guess most flash chips are big enough to easily hold that amount of information.
Maybe I'll give it a go some day just for the fun of it :D
@jezze Thank you very much for reply! Yes, the virtual floppies of 2.88 MB size (those rare "fat floppies") are also supported there. And luckily, when you replace the bloated proprietary UEFI by this wonderful slim open source BIOS, suddenly there is a lot of free space! for me, with UEFI it was 3.5 of 4 MB taken ---> with coreboot+SeaBIOS just 1 MB taken, other 3 MB are free now, ready to be occupied with some good OS ! LZMA compression does miracles, e.g. compressed a memtest floppy from 1.44 MB to just about 45 KB - in 32 times, really helps to use a space efficiently - even when there's not many
Wish you a great 2018 :dog2: , happy life and bugless code :wink: Will be following your project,
and if one day you'd make this floppy I will be amoung the first to put it inside the bare metal :smiley:
@jezze Hi there, Jezze ! :wink: Any updates regarding a possible floppy build? (could be 2.88MB - it is supported) I'll be updating my coreboot in the near future and that would be a good opportunity to test your OS as a part of coreboot - I will do it if a floppy would be available
Hi!
Right now I'm in a big redesign stage of userspace and it's a bit wonky at the moment. Unless you just want to play around with it for fun you can still do that but I wouldn't recommend it for doing actual day-to-day work yet. It's still not close to being that mature.
Anyway, I downloaded coreboot today and I tried to figure out how to add fudge as a payload to it. Unfortunately I couldn't get it to work so I will have to debug it a bit further. It looks like the kernel loads fine but for some reason it goes into a cyclic reboot. I'm not sure if it's fudge or coreboot to blame yet, from what I could tell elf and multiboot support was very basic, there might be some weird use-case missing from their implementation but I need to spend some more time with it.
Out of curiosity, what options do you use for your coreboot build today? Size of flash rom for instance? Do you use Linux directly as the payload or do you use something else like seabios or grub2 or something and then load Linux in a later stage (assuming you use Linux of course).