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Operating Systems Software

Open Source OS that Uses BIOS for Drive Access? 46

Posted by Cliff from the is-DOS-the-only-one dept.
Int13 asks: "I noticed a question in a review of a book on RAID controllers: 'Why, the author asks, do makers of controller cards put all their BIOS utilities on DOS floppies which require us to find a DOS boot disk?' The reason for this is actually very simple. DOS is one of the few mainstream operating systems that will ALWAYS boot on a PC from any supported boot device, and it doesn't require any special disk drivers at all to accomplish this task or to support any file system that has BIOS support. RAID controllers always supply BIOS support, usually in an extension ROM. This leads directly to the question: Are there any other alternative open source operating systems that will do the same? (no, not Open DOS, since it's just a DOS clone)"

"Why can't Linux use a virtual x86 box to call INT 13h when there is no driver for a particular drive type? It would also have to play nice with the BIOS data area and extended BIOS data area and respect the top of low memory, but that's only a few kilobytes at most. Then people probably wouldn't need a DOS boot disk anymore. If such a thing already exists, is there some reason the install disks for most distros don't support it?

(Before anyone tries to claim that Linux plays nice with the extended BIOS data area and the top of low memory, I can tell you from personal experience that it definitely does not, at least not by default).
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Open Source OS that Uses BIOS for Drive Access? More

Open Source OS that Uses BIOS for Drive Access?

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  • It's ubiquitous and MS isn't going to throw a snit if you have a few boot disks laying around.
    • If I had a few boot disks lying about. I've only bought 3 MS products, DOS3.1 in 1986, WinNT 4.0 in 2000 and W2k in 2001. My 5 1/4 floppies for DOS3.1 don't work so well anymore.
      • You can always download a boot disk for FreeDOS or Caldera OpenDOS free and legal online. There are a million sites with a barebones MS DOS 6.2 or IBM PC DOS 7 boot images if you need that as well.
        • I just flashed my ASUS MB from a FreeDOS diskette last night. Funky screen redraws, but who cares?

          I'm now MS free. b)

          • Funny you'd mention both ASUS and FreeDOS.

            Yesterday I was at work, installing Windows drivers on a computer equipped with an ASUS motherboard. After rebooting I suddenly noticed a FreeDOS prompt staring at me. It turned out that the driver/utility CD that Asus had provided with the Motherboard (which I had left in the drive) was equipped with a bootable FreeDOS distribution. Although I didn't need it at the time, I thought to myself how convenient this feature could be in many situations.

            Clever thinking,
    • Nothing wrong with DOS?

      Try using it... eeek

      Why should we be forced to use DOS (nothing against MS here) when I am sure that an OSS project could be implemented and go on to become as popular as DOS boot disks.

      Afaik there is no support I know of - don't ask me why - I looked into it a while ago and was aghast. I know that BeOS (ver. 5) has a feature like this, and can't imagine it being overly difficult to create.

      Just my $0.02

      • I think it was Maxtor or WD that used some sort of Free Software on their diagnostic boot disks.

      • Why should we be forced to use DOS (nothing against MS here) when I am sure that an OSS project could be implemented and go on to become as popular as DOS boot disks.

        How are "DOS" and "an OSS project" mutually exclusive in light of FreeDOS (which several others have mentioned) and the DJGPP compiler suite [delorie.com]?

      • with a BeOS boot floppy you still need either the CD or a partition with BeOS installed on it for it to work though
      • Nothing wrong with DOS?

        Try using it... eeek

        I did for about 5 years until work forced Win 95b on me. At the time I swore I could automate ANY task using batch files (shell scripts - if you are too young). DOS's biggest down fall was complete and total lack of forethought. Every change that came about was like an aftermarket bolt-on for a car. To maintain backwards compatibility everything was a hack to add another feature.

        I mean what is DOS really? Its an OS that lets you load and run a program. Is

  • This isn't the interesting question to ask. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by xyzzy ( 10685 ) on Tuesday April 29, 2003 @09:11AM (#5833138) Homepage
    The real question is: how long before these clowns get real and realize that the floppy drive is GOING AWAY -- I mean, seriously, most BIOSes are bigger than 1.44mb now! It's silly to still be manacled to this outdated, ridiculous technology.
    • We are not 'manacled' to this 'outdated, ridiculos technology'. We simply choose to use it for portability. Every computer built in say the last 20 or so years has a floppy drive (some new computers, do come without them however), so you know whatever you have on there will work. Regardless of wether they have a CD bootable BIOS or anything like that.

      Chances are these days we do not need floppies, but nothing is forcing you to use them :)

      An old box of mine doesn't have a CD drive, only a floppy and net

    • It's silly to still be manacled to this outdated, ridiculous technology.

      Yes. Right. Absolutely. Correct.

      In real life, though, when your computer starts to sink beneath the waves, when you're almost ready to believe you have bad hardware, you'll grow to love that manacle to the life preserver floppy.

      It's an ugly piece of trash, to be sure, but it does float.

      • Bootable CD's emulate floppies. That's how they work. The BIOS looks for a signature on the CD and if present, makes it look like a floppy. Of course, you can only use a floppies worth of information on that CD (I think 2.88M anyway) but that's enough to load drivers to access the rest of the CD in any case.

        Some boot loaders such as GRUB which DO use INT 13 actually do quite a bit. They are almost as much (and maybe more so) of an OS than DOS was, and are quite small.
        GRUB may actually be a good replacement

    • Ignoring your (sarcastic?) main point, instead re:

      I mean, seriously, most BIOSes are bigger than 1.44mb now!

      How long then before mainstrean manufacturers start shipping a standardized small "boot" or "rescue" O.S in their bios, with some kind of user interface, core device drivers and a few tools, available at boot time either in addition to or as a replacement for the bios options screen.

      It would seem pretty simple to just include DOS (or some open source alternative) using part of the bios as a boo

          1. I mean, seriously, most BIOSes are bigger than 1.44mb now!

          How long then before mainstrean manufacturers start shipping a standardized small "boot" or "rescue" O.S in their bios, with some kind of user interface, core device drivers and a few tools, available at boot time either in addition to or as a replacement for the bios options screen.

        2 comments;

        1.44MB bios files can be pre-compressed and then decompressed on the fly. (Some PC BIOS utilities do this already.)

        Some PC system BIOSes already

      • I have used a SUN computer some years ago that provided something like this - I can't remember the precise details but I think that it had a forth-like command line environment available at boot time which was stored in ROM / flash RAM

        It's called Open Firmware [http], and used on Macs as well. It provides a way to have a driver built into an expansion card that's machine independent, a complete Forth interpreter, and a really nice hardware diagnostics/debugging system (as long as you know a bit of Forth). I've

      • There was a magic key combination that you could hold down during bootup to get System 6 up off ROM. Useful-ish for those moments when you'd somehow killed the bootblocks, but you had to have a repair tool on the hard disk somewhere. Sticking the contents of the Disk Utilities floppy in there would have made it seriously handy.

        --- I think it was, unless that was goofy nosegrind to Christ Air combo.

  • Easy, yet unknown (Score:2, Informative)

    by veldmon ( 595009 )
    You have to compile a DOS module into the Linux kernel. It's the 3rd or 4th link when you google for "DOS linux module".

  • Hello? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by His name cannot be s ( 16831 ) on Tuesday April 29, 2003 @09:38AM (#5833304) Journal
    To start with, you can use the fully open source FREEDOS [freedos.org].

    Secondly, I can't see any reason, other than performance why Linux couldn't work off of Int13 , and use Bios-level calls for all disk access. It's probably a good idea, and it would get use to some nice places.

    Thirdly, the reason that the OEMs are using dos boot disks for bios updates and whatnot, is because it is far more simple, predictable and stable to use an OS that doesn't have anything clever going on when you are flashing the BIOS.

    and Finally, simplicity. DOS is downright stupidly simple to build a boot disk for, and the commands are simple to use, and it is simple to talk someone thru an operation over the phone.

    I know that there are many people who can build a boot disk for linux and they will come out of the woodwork to say it's easy, but it ain't as easy as SYS'ing a disk and dumping on IO.SYS ,MSDOS.SYS and COMMAND.COM.

    That, and try finding a Linux disk that is smaller than 300K ( as even the bloated IO.SYS/MSDOS.SYS/COMMAND.COM combo from Win98 is) and you'll find that it is just not going to fit.
    • What decrepid version of windows are you using that can still sys a floppy???? All modern and usable flavors of windows can't do that. I keep a compressed dos 7 boot image from Micron around for those times when I do need DOS but I don't think I've used it in over a year (and I worked in desktop support until very recently so I'm as likely as anyone to need it)
      • He didn't say anything about running sys from windows. but freedos has it's own version of sys.com that plops it's kernel.sys and command.com onto a disk just nicely.
      • Unless you count XP as unusable, you can create a DOS bootdisk in windows XP. It's just a checkbox away when you format a floppy.
    • I can't see any reason, other than performance why Linux couldn't work off of Int13 , and use Bios-level calls for all disk access

      Having written a few device drivers for custom OSs, maybe I am out of date and talking out my hat here ... but once the control diverts to some foreign INT 13 code, no telling what it is going to do, such as enable / disable interrupts, mess around with interrupt controllers, muck about in RAM or the stack or user mode, absolutely no telling. It's not a Microsoft-type loss of

  • AtheOS (Score:3)

    by red_dragon ( 1761 ) on Tuesday April 29, 2003 @10:29AM (#5833765) Homepage

    AtheOS [atheos.cx] uses the BIOS for disk access, according to the website:

    There is an IDE driver on it's way (only tested on one machine, and not part of the current distro). But generally all disk accesses are done through the BIOS, so most IDE and SCSSI disks should work. I even boot AtheOS from my panic ZIP disk every now and then.

    I have to wonder what AtheOS' disk performance is, though. It was common during the Windows 3.11 days for disk controller makers to produce 32-bit disk drivers for Windows that would bypass the BIOS and talk to the controller directly, thus avoiding expensive protected-to-real-mode-and-back switches.

  • Most OS's will use Int13 and access the disk through the bios if they are forced to (some, it's pretty hard to get to do).. Obviously the performance of the drive using this method is absolutely horrible, but it does work. Both Linux and Win2K (not sure about earlier versions of NT or 9x) are capable of it. You may be able to find out how to do it by googling a little bit -- sorry that I don't know off the top of my head how to tell you to do it. -- it's a kernel configuration thing in linux IIRC..

    ~GoRK
    • Argh, not Windows 2000/XP. If you switch your motherboard for one that uses a different make of IDE chipset, the OS just blue-screens straight after booting. It loads the old IDE driver, fails to find the hardware, then just stops. Microsoft's official advice is actually to reinstall from scratch-- they supply a complex registry-editing procedure on their knowledgebase but warn that it's easy to get wrong and it takes as least as long to perform as a complete reinstall. So yes, this is one of very rare
  • Typing at you live over a LinuxRouterProject firewall...

    fwbox# uptime
    07:58:48 up 135 Days (3247h), load average: 0.16 0.03 0.01
    fwbox#

    Linux boots fine from the floppy, and next time I junk a computer and steal it's floppy this box will have a /dev/fd1 (B:) drive and UNLIMITED SPACE (comparatively speaking).
    Freshmeat is littered with projects that boot Linux from floppies, and I've used a few distros that boot nicely from CDs, and even played with a floppy booting linux that mounted a parallel port Z
  • I'm gonna get flamed or called some random name for this.. but here's my guess.

    Using the bios is prolly slower. If the cpu can access the card across the bus directly, I'd wager that it's faster than going to the bios, which doesn't need to be the fastest thing in the world to access directly.

    Why isn't there a chip on the board that's fast and generic would be my next question, unless they use the bus in place of the bios and skip the whole "standards" idea.

  • Firmware (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This type of update is only found in the x86 world which really needs to wake up to the wonders of nice firmware. OpenFirmware on the PPC or Sparc platforms make such things very simple and much nicer then a DOS boot disk. Using openfirmware I can boot off just about any device connected to the system. Once booted I can then access data on just about any other device on the system.

    Personally I'd prefer to see x86 move away from the BIOS and toward the more advanced firmware solutions.
  • I am starting to see a few manufacturers that are changing their means for configuring the devices. These vendors have responded to the cries if thier users, complaining that they don't like the fact that they have to use a boot floppy to configure the device.

    The sad news is that the vendors' responses have been to switch from a DOS boot disk to either a bootable CD-ROM (not much of a difference in my mind) or a win32 utility, which REQUIRES you to have Windows installed in order to configure the device.
  • I believe that for compatibility reasons the peripheral I/O component of the BIOS still works in real mode which makes it difficult to use from protected mode where all normal OSs are (for example, addressing memory between the two is a pain).
  • every utility disk I have received recently was a DOS boot disk or a windows app.

    I have not had to find a DOS bot disk for a long time. So I think the problem is a non-issue.

    The decline in utility disks that don't boot probable has to do with win XP not supporting a true DOS mode.
  • The BIOS on many machines can't be used to access drives reliably anymore: increasingly the only thing that gets tested and implemented is something that manages to read the first few megabytes off a boot device.

    In fact, this is getting to be a real problem with SYSLINUX-based installers and rescue disks--those fail with many machines using USB or FireWire CD-ROMs for booting.

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