Re: new DOS source
- Posted by useless_ Jul 07, 2013
- 4072 views
But who cares about the bios anyhow, it's there on the motherboard when you buy it! You do not need to get rid of it. Use it directly or not, your choice.
Because it can still get in the way even if I don't want to use it. E.g. that 400-500us timing loop for USB legacy support.
Also, even if I'm not using it, it's still taking up space in memory since it's mapped into the address space. What if I want to use that space for something else?
And "modern" is also an operative word, meaning a small ramdrive of some flavor as C:\.
How is this modern? Ramdisks have been around since the time of CP/M. Linux/GNU has had support for using ramdisks as the root since virtually the beginning.
You had previously said :
and need to have some kind of random access hardware (flopy or hard disk)
Which as you now admit, isn't true.
Edit: My mistake. Booting DOS from C: as a ramdisk does seem to be relatively modern: http://www.styma.org/bootcdrom/bootcdrom.shtml
I assumed that, since Linux/GNU has had support for using ramdisks a root for several decades now, that something as flexible and extendable as DOS should have had it for just as long as well. My mistake.
Agreed, I admit that it isn't true - with modern technology you can downgrade to booting DOS from sequential access hardware instead! http://www.geekinterview.com/question_details/34494
Edit: The original point that I intended to make stands. An arduino remains superior as it doesn't need random access hardware or a CD drive to load its code, unlike DOS.
The Pi requires a memory card, and a dos pc can be booted from a pata ssd (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive). After you put the minimum sized mobo ram you can buy today into the pc, the space taken up by a 1 Mbyte bios is trivial. You are sweating a megabyte (vs an Arduino?), and i am talking of gigabytes on a pico/mini/microATX mobo. Besides, the bios can be copied into ram and the prom on the mobo paged out, it's done, executing from the bios copy in ram is faster.
I am going to drop this topic now.
useless
