[ColorForth] Chuck's Posts on USB and Network

[kbk@xxxxxxxxx (Kurt B. Kaiser)]

"Chuck Moore" <chipchuck@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> But you can't boot from USB flash. I think the time has come to use
> CD-R/W and forget floppy.

Apparently the newer BIOSs can, but it's certainly not universal.  The
industry is in transition.  Eventually everything local will be USB (or AGP).  

I just read a posting where a guy was having problems accessing a
IDE CD-R/W using Debian Linux.  So no panacea, but maybe less problematic
than a floppy on newer systems.  

My understanding is that you use PCs because they're cheap and
universal.  But for your own work you consider them a stopgap measure
until Forth chip based HW is available.  Why not use as much of the
BIOS as possible to access some mass storage to get a stable Forth
kernel loaded?  Then use that to take over the system and access the
USB mass storage and the network directly for development?

If you look at the Linux drivers you'll be struck by the complexity
needed to support all the different HW configurations.  You want to
support as few interfaces as possible, and preferably via the
manufacturer-supplied compatibility layers.  (Life is too short to
re-write the compatibility layers.)

We are all getting our Forth off the net.  Very few of us are keying
it in or buying it on floppies.  So we are bootstrapping simple
systems from a very complex ones.  Since few of us want to risk
corrupting the complex system by running developmental ColorForth on
it, the problem reduces to how to get the ColorForth image into the
development system.  It's not quite the same as embedded development,
because Forth is self hosting once you get it installed, so a
continuous serial link is not necessary.

Floppies should be a universal way to do this on systems of widely
varying age, but there seem to be more problems than expected with the
current bootstrap method.  A lot of time is being spent on this.

Maybe, as previously suggested by Slicker and Loveall, flat real mode
is the answer, since you don't care about interprocess protection and
therefore you don't really need protected mode, just a big, flat
address space.

Well, just my (inflated) two cents. 

Regards, KBK
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