vmware bochs osr5 under linux

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From: carl.sopchak@cegis123.com (Carl Sopchak)
Subject: Re: INT13 function FAh during boot?
Date: 24 Apr 2002 05:21:08 -0700
References: <c12f3009.0204221242.29c063c4@posting.google.com> <20020422173448.A9014@mammoth.ca.caldera.com> <c12f3009.0204230653.6be8199b@posting.google.com> <20020423181933.C9014@mammoth.ca.caldera.com> 

Thanks, again, Bela, for the detailed reply.  Some comments below...

Bela Lubkin <belal@caldera.com> wrote in message news:<20020423181933.C9014@mammoth.ca.caldera.com>...
> Carl Sopchak wrote:
> 
> > I'll check out the VMWare thread.  Could provide useful info, even if
> > it is not directly related to Int13/FAh.  Thanks for the pointer...
> 
> It might.  Also, your experiences with bochs might be helpful to the
> people struggling with VMWare -- all indications are that VMWare has no
> interest in trying to work with OpenServer, so maybe those people should
> stop beating their heads against it and use something that tries to
> work.

VMWare's stated policy to not support OSR5 is why I stopped even
trying to get that to work.  bochs and plex86, as far as I can tell,
both seem to be in active development (something you kinda have to
watch out for with Open Source projects, I've found...).  I was really
quite please with bochs' responsiveness to the boot issues.  There are
new issues that need resolving, though.  We'll see if the
responsiveness is similar <grin>.

> 
> > As far as other issues trying to run OSR5 on bochs, I've got a hacked
> > bios that gets around initial boot problems, but the kernel
> 
> What initial boot problems are you talking about?  Just the INT13:FA
> problem?  That is, I believe, a bug in the bochs BIOS.  It should accept
> any unknown BIOS call, returning with carry set (and as I said,
> registers unchanged, but I'm not so sure about that.  Probably couldn't
> hurt, though.)

I couldn't boot from the floppy OR the cd-rom.  The CD-Rom problem, if
I recall correctly, was that it was checking for a boot signature
(0x55AA, I believe) that wasn't found.  It also had the INT13:FA
problem, since it ended up booting from a floppy image that was on the
CD.  Both have been fixed with the hacks made by the bochs developer. 
They should be committed to the bochs CVS in the near future (so I was
told), and I would imagine made part of the next release.

> 
> Now, bochs probably has a really good reason not to do that: in order
> to ferret out yet-unknown calls that they need to implement in order to
> improve the emulation.  But that should be a setting that you control --
> you should be able to set it to behave like a system that doesn't have
> the service; or to balk, like it currently does.  You would only use the
> latter setting if you were a bochs developer (or were trying to debug a
> failure).

I agree that it should be configurable, and so did the bochs developer
when I suggested it to him.  He said he added it to his to-do list...

> 
> > initialization causes it to crash at F dptrinit (I once made it to F
> > fdi_init).  I know I've run across the list describing these
> > initialization steps, but can't put my finger on it.  Can anyone point
> > me to it?
> 
> See http://osr5doc.ca.caldera.com:457/HANDBOOK/tshootD.kinilet.html for
> documentation on the boot letter sequence.  But it only briefly covers
> the "F" series, which is where you're likely to have the most trouble.
> When it says "F xxinit", it's initializing driver "xx".  The ones that
> are most likely to cause you trouble are hardware drivers.  The two you
> mention are the drivers for older DPT SCSI and RAID host adapters, and
> for the Future Domain 18x0 chipset (Future Domain 16x0, 600, 700, and
> Adaptec 292x host adapters).
> 
> bochs probably emulates a single variety of SCSI host adapter, something
> that has simple hardware and is easy to emulate.  As long as it isn't
> one of those two, you can just disable those host adapter drivers.  The
> syntax is:
> 
>   Boot
>   : defbootstr disable=dptr,fdi_
> 
> OpenServer drivers have two names, which are _usually_ the same, but in
> the case of that Future Domain driver they are different.  One is "fdhb"
> and the other is "fdi_".  I'm not sure which you must specify in the
> "disable" statement.  Actually it looks like there's no harm in
> attempting to disable unrecognized drivers, so just give it:
> 
>   Boot
>   : defbootstr disable=dptr,fdhb,fdi_
> 
> If it hangs at other "F xxinit" points, add those to your disable list.
> Once you've successfully installed, the host adapter drivers that don't
> apply to your system will be linked out of the kernel, so you won't have
> to keep doing this.

I found the letter descriptions in the handbook.  I ran across another
one of your posts (from quite a while back) that suggtested the
disable=, which I used (although I used disable=fdi, not disable=fdi_)
and seemed to work.  Now, however, OSR5 doesn't find a hard disk.  I
have a post on the bochs discussion forums (and added a bug to their
tracking list) about this, trying to find out what controller they
emulate.  It appears that it's a single-channel IDE controller,
though...  (Limits you to one HD + one CD, or two HDs.)

Just had a thought...  Are there any limits to the geometry of a drive
that OSR5 can use?  bochs uses "drive images" (files) to emulate a
hard disk, and you tell bochs what the geometry is.  Maybe that's
where the problem is?  The image I'm using has a geometry of
C/H/S=1015/16/63 (512Mb).  (I tried using biosgeom [from another of
your long-ago posts], to no avail...)

> 
> > Bela, thanks for the info on the LAN boot proms.  Do you mind if I
> > copy your response (with credit, of course) into the bochs bug report
> > that I initiated on the bochs site?  I'm sure it would be helpful to
> > their development.
> 
> That's fine with me.  Plus this message with the more details and
> ranting.  ;-}

I was going to post this just on the bug report.  I'll point them to
this thread on google, in case they're interested.  Thanks.


> 
> > If people are interested, I could keep this newsgroup updated on my
> > attempts to get OSR5 running on Linux.  Let me know.
> 
> Yes, please do.  A fair number of people have asked about this sort of
> thing, and everything's archived forever (until google gets bored with
> it) in groups.google.com...

Will do.  I'll keep this thread alive with new issues that pop up, and
when I get it going (hopefully in the not too, too distant future!), I
post a summary of what I had to do.

> 
> >Bela<


Carl
 

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