Partitioning under Linux?

[Jim Gettys]

OFW does not emulate all the legacy PC hardware you'd need to run DOS
unchanged: e.g. VESA (since the VESA emulation code in AMD's Geode VSA
was the one part they could not open source due to not owning rights),
and the PCI configuration emulation code (which was getting in our way
for fast resume).

DOS would (did) run on the Insyde bios used initially on the ATest
boards, but that BIOS won't run on the later OLPC system (it would need
lots of drivers like DCON, to be functional).

So no, DOS won't run on the raw iron; it should run under the PC
emulators for Linux.
                                  - Jim


On Wed, 2007-05-09 at 10:56 +0100, MARTIN WOODHOUSE wrote:
> Hello Mitch and thanks for the info, which tells me a whole lot of
> things I needed to know.
>  
> I guess what I really need to know is whether, if MSDOS (or FreeDOS)
> were to be loaded onto the (existing) XO, it would then be possible to
> run an MSDO-based application on that machine?
>  
> Cheers,  Martin
> 
> Mitch Bradley <wmb at firmworks.com> wrote:
>         
>         
>         MARTIN WOODHOUSE wrote:
>         > Hello All
>         > 
>         > ( C'est moi, the Ancient Mariner, again .. . )
>         > 
>         > Is it possible to partition a hard drive under LinuxBIOS? I
>         assume 
>         > it is, but I need to be sure. If so, can both drives be made
>         bootable?
>         
>         Linux can create partitions on, for example, USB hard drives,
>         and Open 
>         Firmware can boot from multiple partitions. We don't encourage
>         it 
>         because partitions just make all the procedures more
>         complicated. The 
>         documentation can easily become bewildering in the face of
>         different 
>         partitions and filesystem types and whatnot.
>         
>         With the current software, it is not possible to partition the
>         internal 
>         NAND FLASH, which is the main storage medium that the children
>         will use.
>         
>         The OLPC bootloader is Open Firmware, not LinuxBIOS. The
>         information 
>         about LinuxBIOS on the wiki is somewhat out of date. Strictly
>         speaking, 
>         LinuxBIOS has never been the bootloader. When we used
>         LinuxBIOS, it was 
>         used for low-level hardware initialization. LinuxBIOS depends
>         on a 
>         separate "payload" program to do bootloading from disks. In
>         general, 
>         that payload can be a dedicated bootloader like GRUB or LILO,
>         a 
>         stripped-down Linux system "Linux as Bootloader", or Open
>         Firmware. 
>         From a few months starting in August of last year, OLPC used
>         LinuxBIOS 
>         + Linux-as-Bootloader. Towards the end of 2006, we switched
>         to 
>         LinuxBIOS+OpenFirmware. The current scheme, beginning with
>         the 
>         recently-release C-series firmware, is OpenFirmware with
>         table-driven 
>         early initialization.
>         
>         
>         
>         > 
>         > Cheers and love, Martin.
>         >
>         ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>         >
>         > _______________________________________________
>         > Devel mailing list
>         > Devel at laptop.org
>         > http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
>         > 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Devel mailing list
> Devel at laptop.org
> http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
-- 
Jim Gettys
One Laptop Per Child