They are here! M$ and a new trick!

[bloodline]

Jope wrote:

bloodline wrote:
I've just remembered that all PC BIOS chips use FAT to read the boot disk... this really is a bad bad thing...

Whu..?

The PC BIOS code reads the first sector of the media, which in turn contains the bootloader that loads the OS.

Either the bootloader can know FAT (grub) or it can just know the sectors it needs to read to find the OS image (LILO).

If the bootloader doesn't know FAT, then the OS is finally the one that may or may not be able to read FAT disks.. Depending on the OS and it's configs of course.

Basically you can boot a PC without it knowing a thing about FAT, if you use LILO and leave FAT support out of the Linux kernel.

On a PC, the bootblock (boot sector) always takes control of the entire machine once it's loaded and run.. On the Amiga, multitasking is already going by the time the OS starts thinking about searching for a boot volume.

Some PC BIOSes might have the ability to fix themselves by reading the BIOS image in from a FAT formatted disk, but that's a special case and isn't in any way related to the booting procedure.

Boot linux, and format a floppy using ext2 file system.

Now put the standard MSDOS shell command.com on that disk.

pop that floppy disk in the drive and rest your machine. it will come up with an error.

Now format the disk using FAT12  and put the command.com program on there... now rename the program foobar.com.

Reset the machine, and when it boots, it will promt you for the file name of the command interpreter... which can be entered and it will boot.

 Hense the BIOS can read the FS...

But more interestingly, tell me more about this booting from a disk if the BIOS is dead?

[Jettah]

@Speulgoudmannegie

Fully off topic!! Lots of excuses.

Komst hailmoal oet Stad? Ende fot, ja! Hefe Weiss bier? Lekker man! Kom moar ais aine drink'n!

Tjitte (daipfraize...)

[Jettah]

@mikeymike

It reminds me of a story I heard about the old days of IBM and mainframes, where they used to charge depending on how many CPU cycles were used by the customer. Damn that would be expensive on Windows

It reminds me of IBM mainframes using cardreaders, way back in the seventies. I used to work at a local computer centre where 5 cardreaders were employed. Licenced for use at up to 100 cards or so a minute. Until one of our more clever minds discovered that you only needed a different belt to drive the machine. The puleys were all in place to achieve a 600 cards per minute performance. We only paid for a low performance 100 cards per minute machine. Nobody noticed. Until suddenly without any reason am IBM senior technician came down and noticed the incredible speed of the machines...

Just for the fun of reciting...
cheers,
Tjitte

[Jettah]

@ mikeymike

reckon Longhorn will get shelved. I think the featureset MS wanted to release with it is going to get broken down over a number of releases, as it has done with MS and "next gen OS's" for a long time.

Couldn't it be that longhorn is a bit resource-hungry and that Intel has a few problems to deal with their P5 incarnation of the processor? Heat problems for instance? It is reported that the P5 already consumes about a 135 Watts while not significantly outperforming a top-notch P4. Which means that power consumption will be enormous when higher clockings ar reached.

But why are we so interested in Wintel? We eat, sleap, dream, chase, love, hug, caress, toy, pat, tickle, kiss, wipe, customize, and do all other kinds of frolicking about an Amiga, THE Amiga, isn't it?

cheers,

Tjitte.

[mikeymike]

Couldn't it be that longhorn is a bit resource-hungry

Since when has that stopped MS releasing new operating systems? (semiserious)

Intel has a few problems to deal with their P5 incarnation of the processor? Heat problems for instance? It is reported that the P5 already consumes about a 135 Watts while not significantly outperforming a top-notch P4. Which means that power consumption will be enormous when higher clockings ar reached.

The Prescott core (what a great name) hasn't been dubbed the P5 yet.  I don't think a CPU delay would affect MS in any way.  There's already the AMD64 which works, is currently available and MS have allegedly been writing a 64-bit version of XP.  You may be confusing the Intel heat stories between their Itanium processor range and the Prescott core.

Intel have said something amusing about 100W heat dissipation being perfectly acceptable, kind of reminds me of "640K should be enough for anyone" :-)  I think the feedback they received after that 100W comment forced them to rethink.  People don't like their PCs sounding like vacuum cleaners.

[SilvrDrgn]

Power consumption and dissipation of Intel processors is insane!  And this M$ thing charging for FAT ... what a joke!  'Nuff said.

[chris]

bloodline wrote:
Boot linux, and format a floppy using ext2 file system.

Now put the standard MSDOS shell command.com on that disk.

pop that floppy disk in the drive and rest your machine. it will come up with an error.

That's because there is no bootblock telling it what it should do next.  Format a disk with NTFS and it will complain "cannot find NTLDR".  Format a disk as FAT with CrossDOS and it gives you a different message (something about it being a non-bootable CrossDOS formatted disk, but I forget the exact wording).

The same thing applies on the Amiga, if you don't run "install", the disk won't boot.  If you run "install" from 2.0+, you get a blank screen and it loads s:startup-sequence.  Commercial games had their own custom bootblock, often on a not normally readable filesystem, and they still managed to boot.

Chris

[Tomas]

I have nothing against the collection of royalties for your patents, however, why can't these companies just use different file systems?

I don't have memory cards here, however can't I just format them to a different file system?

Then it would probably be unreadable by 99% of the devices that use this flash cards  :-(  This is due to the fact that i think they only support fat fs... pretty sad indeed

[jeffimix]

I do have software that let me read Macintosh Zip/Floppy discs on my PC.

[Waccoon]

CodeSmith:  What level are you sinking to when you lock the door to your house?

I can change the lock on my house without having to send the whole door to the manufacturer to have it "refurbished".  Just about all hardware these days, from video cards to CD-ROMs allow firmware updates.  A fixed ROM BIOS is just so... Amiga.

If you're suggesting that the pirate protection is to keep Pegasos users from using AmigaOS4, well you can thank Bill Buck for choosing the nastiest dongle ever: the Marvell Discovery chipset, which is 100% incompatible with the Articia S

Only on the Pegasos2.  The Pegasos uses the same chipset as the AmigaOne.

Coder:  I agree so much on that. I remember when Linux was fun but now I have to admit it's turning into a Windows clone. Because that is what will attract the non-geeks they think. It got to stop.

Well, there's little central unification when it comes to anything other than the kernel, so Linux probably will never make any major strides in the interface, anyway.  People still blame Red Hat for trying.

Linux is made by geeks for geeks.  That is its audience, and it will probably stay there.  The only hope I see for turning Linux into a true desktop machine is to eliminate the XWindows way of thinking and make a new interface.  Of course, if you do that, there are better kernel choices, too.

My ideal system would be QNX running a GUI similar to the original Amiga, an entirely new shell, and a built-in interpreted programming language (more like Java and less like Perl/PHP).  I see no point in making a new OS just to run bash, XWindows, Gnome...

iamaboringperson:  I don't have memory cards here, however can't I just format them to a different file system?

Memory card readers don't care, but cameras do.  Nobody saw the crackdown on FAT coming, so everybody just used FAT12 by default so everything would work with Windows.

It's just a popularity issue, though.  I'm sure Apple would have done the same with HFS if they owned the market.  Being #2 in the industry makes it a bit hard for Apple to put their foot down and charge for every little piece of their pie.

Bloodline:  Hense the BIOS can read the FS...

PC BIOS is obsolete.  All it really does is monitor hardware and activate the boot drive so the OS can be started.  After that, the OS and drivers do all the work.  90% of BIOS options these days are set to defaults and ignored, unless you're trying to get Windows3.1 to boot.   ;-)

But more interestingly, tell me more about this booting from a disk if the BIOS is dead?

ROM backup.  Intel mobos do that.  I salvaged a non-working Intel motherboard for $20 ($90 value), just by downloading an emergency BIOS tool from the Intel website.  What a deal!   I wish all motherboards had a small ROM for reading the floppy drive and reprogramming the BIOS.  It would make BIOS updates a lot less worrysome.  :-D

Chris:  That's because there is no bootblock telling it what it should do next. Format a disk with NTFS and it will complain "cannot find NTLDR".

Yup.  The Bootblock of an NTFS partition is too small to do anything major, so it does its thing, then looks for NTLDR.  It must have some sort of security check, though, since if something happens to the filesystem, the machine will complain it can't find NTLDR, even though it is there and intact.  NTFS is a real pain in the ass.

[Methuselas]

I work in the Industrial Property industry and US Patents last 20 years. After which as far as I am aware you can't repurchase it, they just lapse.

See, I wasn't too clear on that. I was under the impression that a said person could protect his intellectual property, hence the said 'FAT' format.

If what you say is true, why is it that Microsoft waited until about the same time Windoze came out?!?

[Hammer]

PC BIOS is obsolete. All it really does is monitor hardware and activate the boot drive so the OS can be started. After that, the OS and drivers do all the work. 90% of BIOS options these days are set to defaults and ignored, unless you're trying to get Windows3.1 to boot.

IF it’s obsolete why not just re-flash your BIOS with zeros? Let's see IF your system can boot up... Obsolesce means that an item can be discarded.

Modern PC BIOS is important since they take care most of the integrated features (i.e. activation/ deactivation) of any full featured X86 motherboards. These integrated features can range from SATA RAID, PATA RAID, AC97, 1394, USB Mouse/Keyboard, FSB settings**, voltage settings**, memory settings**, 100Mb/1Gb NICs, AGP Aperture, AGP8X activation/deactivation switch, AGP fast writes,  dual BIOS and etc.

MS WinXP drivers wouldn't see SATA RAID, PATA RAID and AC97 IF they are deactivated via PC’s BIOS settings.

PS; The mentioned integrated features are all present in GA-7N400 Pro2*. ASUS A7N8X Deluxe* also has similar features sets.

*Illustrated as examples.
**Extensive features for overclocking and performance oriented tweaking.

None of X86 LinuxBIOS will replace the nForce 2 BIOS in terms of the feature set. IF there is one then would like to hear it.  

PC's BIOS shields Windows the difference between chipsets for booting, safe mode and during setup** i.e. VIA KT600 (VIA 4in1 drivers) vs NVIDIA nForce2 (NV Forceware) vs Intel 865/875 and 'etc'.

You can’t say something is obsolete IF said item is important to the system processes.  

Refer to
http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix03/tech/freenix03/agnew/agnew_html/index.html

Look for "Table 1" and refer to "Operating system dependencies on BIOS interrupt functionality".

Also, there are terms that associated with PC BIOS e.g.
PNP BIOS
ACPI, I.e Power On by keyboard, Power On by Mouse,Modem RingOn, PME Event Wake Up,
PCI Table
Int13 Handling
'etc'.

PS;
1. VIA’s Hyperion 4in1_V4.51 drivers will override any AGP Aperture settings to 32(i.e. workarounds) since there are issues with VIA based chipsets, +1GB memory and ATI AGP cards.

2.
As for "PC BIOS. The BIOS, most always written in assembler, operates mostly in 16 bit mode, and provides services that few modern 32 bit operating systems require" Usenix's fluff,
Phoenix BIOS 4.0 supports " BIOS32 Service Directory" i.e.  for 32bit code and services.

http://www.phoenix.com/en/customer+services/white+papers-specs/pc+industry+specifications.htm

[Hammer]

Couldn't it be that longhorn is a bit resource-hungry

Did you forget Windows Anvil?

Some of the Window’s new and near future releases are; (not including Windows Longhorn release)
MS Windows XP Media Centre (2004) X86-32 OEM/RTM (OEM update (?)).
MS Windows XP Media Centre X86-32 OEM/RTM.
MS Windows XP AMD64* (a.k.a **Windows Anvil (relates to Claw/Sledge Hammer processors)).
MS Windows 2003 Server AMD64**
MS Windows CE .NET 4.2 (current)
MS Windows CE .NET 5.0 (future)

*Substantially different to MS Windows XP IA-64 e.g. better legacy and games support.

As with Windows 9X code base; Microsoft will probably milk Windows NT 5.x code base until Windows longhorn is ready.

[Hammer]

Intel have said something amusing about 100W heat dissipation being perfectly acceptable, kind of reminds me of "640K should be enough for anyone"

Well, Intel has stated something like "the mainstream users doesn’t need a relatively cheap 64bit processor".  

[Rodney]

Vfat compatible filesystems are ok. the only thing MS are charging people for are VFat file systems, not VFat compatible filesystems!

[iamaboringperson]

Now format the disk using FAT12 and put the command.com program on there... now rename the program foobar.com.

Reset the machine, and when it boots, it will promt you for the file name of the command interpreter... which can be entered and it will boot.

Hense the BIOS can read the FS...

No, I think that's false

The code that asks you for the name of the command interpreter will do the same thing regardless of the BIOS, the code to do that is written on the bootblock.

The BIOS can read the bootblock into memory and execute code from it.

Try using a QNX disk, or a Linux boot disk.

Or one interesting idea, is to use PC-TASK, to format a floppy, it has its own interesting code for the boot block!! ;-)