Hiya Ben!
On Sat, 18 Nov 2000, Ben Harris wrote:
> On Thu, 16 Nov 2000, Reinoud Zandijk wrote:
> 
> > I've been working on a modified version of `BBBB' to boot NetBSD/arm32
> > from...
> 
> *shudder*  BBBB was meant to be a stop-gap until someone could write a
> proper bootloader.  Oh well, I suppose this is always the way with
> stop-gaps.

*GRIN* ... well the fact that it is written in BASIC didnt stop me ... but
helped me for i dont have a C compiler under RiscOS anymore. One of the
things i was thinking about is that it is also suitable to load the second
stage bootloader written as a standalone NetBSD program... that has to be
loaded anyway... and your scheme of loading the kernel helped me to build
a safer version ... the current arm32 loader is kinda dirty in the way
that it leaves memory a mess and is poking into the pagetables directly..

> Incidentally, I've just written a useful little tool to convert text files
> into tokenized BBC BASIC, and hidden it at
> <URL:ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/quick-hacks/bastok/>.  This
> makes it possible to generate a usable form of BBBB without needing to
> copy it to and from a RISC OS machine.  I'll put it into the main NetBSD
> source tree once I've worked out where it should go.

Nice but its not nessisary (ahum) ... you can just load your file in
BASIC with "BASIC -load file" ... that loads the text file just fine and
then a simple `SAVE' is enough.

> > Its allmost ready to really relocate stuff and i hope to have it
> > start NetBSD/arm32 tonight or tomorrow... i doubt it will run though for
> > i'll have to munge start() and the init_arm() in rpc_machdep.c to account
> > for the new situation. I've tried to keep as much as BBBB the same so to
> > ease merging into one bootloader allthough i've only changed the a.out
> > loader so it wont hurt NetBSD/arm26 loading :)
> 
> Yes, the a.out stuff is pretty much dead as far as I'm concerned, so you
> can safely break it some more.

Hehe.... yeah ... I've patched it in now so that ELF can be used too for
booting NetBSD/arm32 easily without much changes... It still boots my A4
perfectly :)) allthough the program has significantly grown from about 14
kb (?) to a 23 kb :) ... It now autodetects arm26/arm32 and calls the
relevant procedures...

So who knows :) maybe it'll boot today.... well i ``promised'' y/day but
hehe.. you know how that all works all to well i guess...

Cheers,
Reinoud