Subject: Re: BSD needs BIOS?
To: Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.lip6.fr>
From: Grant Stockly <gussie@stockly.com>
List: port-i386
Date: 08/04/1999 02:24:27
>On Wed, Aug 04, 1999 at 02:10:25AM -0800, Grant Stockly wrote:
>> But I want to have a hard drive connected to this device (for mass temp
>> storage).  Could I disable the BIOS checksum thing?
>
>No, no need. As long as you've said the kernel is root disk is the
>ramdisk, it won't even try to find another one by itself.
>
>Look at the INSTALL config file and stuffs in distrib/i386/floppies,
>they do exactly what you want: the INSTALL kernel (which is put on a floppy,
>CD, loaded from network or win9x, or whatever) has a ramdisk which is his
>root filesystem. But once it booted it can of course see 'real' HDs.

So I shouldn't get a hanging kernel when I fire up the kernel on my
hardware.  :)  Will the kernel still try to get the checksum from BIOS?

Also, if you could, could you point me to the specific file that has the
serial information the kernel uses when booting?  I'd like to write a
specific C segment for that routine so I can see whats happening.

I guess I'm trying to say I'm looking for the file that dumps boot info
over a serial line.  I can already get low level status on memory locations
and the current opcode, but that gives me a headache trying to figure out
where its crashed.  :)

Grant