[Oberon] BB Kernel Size

[Aubrey McIntosh]

I, at least, would love to have the source to your BIOS based routines.  I never did grok how to wrap the BIOS calls from protected mode, and I would study what you did.  Can you boot V4 from a USB stick? (I still use and like V4)  

I have been through the boot sequence in V4 with a lot of attention to detail and made a few custom boot files.  I don't have my Oberon system book here (it's in Texas and I'm away teaching 'till May) but I could probably find what I need in the source pretty quickly.  I don't know how much drift there has been from then to the current BB loader, but as they are fond of saying, "we have the source."


-- Aubrey McIntosh, Ph.D.
   

>>> "Paul Reed" <paulreed at paddedcell.com> 1/20/2006 10:42 AM >>>
> Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2006 10:27:25 -0600
> From: "Aubrey McIntosh" <Aubrey.McIntosh at ridgewater.edu>
> Subject: Re: AW: [Oberon] USB Boot

> With the kernel size growing, does it make sense to produce a boot loader
> that writes into protected mode memory?  Perhaps this could be an Oberon
> language application that has modules such as Modules0 and Files0
> according to the pattern published in the Oberon operating system book,
> and uses the BIOS Int 10H for rudimentary file I/O.  That is, put an
> additional boot layer between the OBL and the Aos<driver>.Bin

Indeed.  A many-stage boot loader system is what all the
other OS's have had to use, as a sensible response to
the PC's brain-damaged architecture.  I have built a
BIOS-based version of the original Oberon which could
be pared down to do exactly this.