Thread: bootable front end

Originally Posted by 2k1Toaster

Well for my senior year I will be required to write a basic custom OS for an x86 processor, so well see if I get anywhere then.

Right now, I have no idea where I would start!

For my middle year degree project I wrote a multi-tasking OS for a 68030 processor. The task switching kernel was only about 200 lines of asm.
x86 is much harder due to all the protected mode, real mode, page tables etc.
Good luck.

i saw that microsoft has Microsoft Automotive OS and toyota would create a new OS only for cars. What should i use to boot very fast i mean about 5-10 sec max. And what is CF ? i saw that some members have that? On my pc spec if i use Vista (i read on Microsoft that boots in 3-5 seC) i would have problems?

Originally Posted by alex_z0ne

i saw that microsoft has Microsoft Automotive OS and toyota would create a new OS only for cars. What should i use to boot very fast i mean about 5-10 sec max. And what is CF ? i saw that some members have that? On my pc spec if i use Vista (i read on Microsoft that boots in 3-5 seC) i would have problems?

CF is Compact Flash , and you can boot the system really quick, but I think that the BIOS would be a bottleneck here, since it typically takes like 10sec for it to pass. Linuxbios is an alternative. From cold start it boots up to console within 3sec on 1GHz platform. That's what I'm trying to adopt to epia board currently.

Regarding booting windows, you can defrag your drive, and put boot files in order right at begining of boot partition for faster load, but it is still way more than 3-5 seconds after BIOS.

CF also means CentraFuse if talking about software.

And the 3 to 5 seconds is sleep. Because the crap macs advertise "instant booting" which is just sending it to sleep and a cold boot takes just as long. So XP and the PC gang is now advertising instant boots which is just sleep/suspend. In the car, this is impracticle unless you have very little RAM and a very efficient processor. It takes a lot of power to keep everything on so that it wakes up "instantly".

compact flash also makes system boot slower just so you know. CF is used more for its rugged design of no moving parts compared to a spinning platter drive.

And in the BIOS, you can get the epia board to go down to like 3-7 seconds.

In the BIOS, disable USB boot, boot other devices, enabled USB in DOS. Change the first boot device to IDE0 (wherever the actual boot partition is), and disable the rest. Disable boot other devices. Also enable quick boot (disabled memory scan), disable full screen logo. On the IDE detection, you will see it has "Auto" probably. Well hit F3 or the button to scan for all devices, note the settings it comes up with for the HD, and change the Auto to those settings manually. This means that that HD and only that HD will now be ableto boot and only off of IDE0 until those settings are changed back. In a car, this is usually acceptable. Disable the other IDE channels.

Those are the bigguns that take time. If you have SATA ports, well you are just screwed as I know of no BIOS that allow individual disabling of SATA ports. It is either all on or all off.

thanks i`ll try that.


How linuxbios works? we should flash the bios? i don`t understand... I have award bios is that what you mean? or OS?

This is the first post that I've seen that touches on one of my bigger concerns, that being disk boot as it relates to temperature (and I mean cold boot literally). Specifically, how are freezing temps going to affect the HD and would that not be a good argument for the CF boot drives (probably w/ Linux because they're small) that are starting to come out.

I've even seen adapters for CF Cards to IDE that can make the system diskless or at least the HD gets used for data and/or secondary storage. I'm just starting to get into this stuff (as you may notice 1st post) but I don't want to start throwing money at a project that I have to thaw out for 15 minutes before I can use it. If there's a better place to research this, feel free to jump in, and thanks in advance for your patience with the noob.

Originally Posted by 2k1Toaster

CF also means CentraFuse if talking about software.

And the 3 to 5 seconds is sleep. Because the crap macs advertise "instant booting" which is just sending it to sleep and a cold boot takes just as long.<snip>

I already use CF through IDE, and it works just perfect. I used to have the hard drive before, but it froze couple of times, and failed to spin up. All the data got corrupted by that time too. I boot linux, and it loads pretty quick. My only bottleneck of boot process is the bios. It takes 10-12sec to go through the bios. I'm replacing it with linux bios that actually initializes all the components, and boots to console within 3sec! It requires lots of preparation though, and it's not safe for beginner. Many of motherboards are not supported too, but epia is!

You just became one of my best friends. We'll chat a bit more about this later when I start throwing money at it. Thanks. I saw this MB (Intel D201GLY) here and thought maybe it could do the trick for a beginner. Any boot in less than a minute is enough for me so I'm not too inclined to screw with the bios unnecessarily. What are your thoughts on ruining Linux and RR with it. My needs are simple. Music, GPSS, maybe a phone camera if I get real ambitious.

Originally Posted by dupa2

I already use CF through IDE <snip>, but epia is!

linux and RR? not a good idea, maybe under emulation, but why bother using linux then, do stripped win xp, and run RR natively.