Re: [ECOS] RedBoot and Flash memory on embedded x86 PC

[Nick Garnett <nickg at ecoscentric dot com>]

Stéphane Husselin <Stephane.Husselin@uqat.ca> writes:

> Hi there!
> 
> I just discovered eCos few days ago and I'd like to use it on my embedded PC
> (Pentium III), but I read that "PC RedBoot does not support any FLASH
> commands" (eCos Reference Manual, Chapter 5. Installation and Testing
> IA32/x86 x86-Based PC).
> The problem is that I don't have any harddrive on my board and I planned to
> use a Flash Disk-on-chip (DOC2000 from M-Systems) instead.
> 
> If RedBoot does not support Flash, does it mean that I couldn't use my
> Disk-on-chip with ecos or is it independant?
> How could I access to my flash if RedBoot is unable to see it?
> 

We don't currently support DOC directly. If your BIOS allows you to
treat the DOC as an IDE device, then you could use GRUB to load either
eCos or RedBoot executables. But once running there is no way to
access it.

DOC suffers the same problems as Compact Flash and real disc devices,
it needs a (VFAT) filsystem implementation to manage it. At present we
do not have such a thing for eCos.

In theory JFFS2 supports DOC, but I don't think that the version
currently in the eCos sources has that in it at present.

-- 
Nick Garnett                    eCos Kernel Architect
http://www.ecoscentric.com/     The eCos and RedBoot experts


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