RE: BIOS emulation

David Mosberger (davidm@AZStarNet.com)
Mon, 18 Sep 1995 12:57:04 -0700

> > Got this with a modified gde 8086 emulator. 386 emulation is not done
> > yet (I think it will be quite some work), but I added one extension
> > and one hack that allows the BIOS code to execute to completion (I
> > assume that the hack is responsible for causing the line of garbage at
> > the top of the screen). Executing the BIOS initialization took about
> > 1/2 a minute---with lots of debugging output though. But boy, did
> > those characters trickling onto the screen look great to my eyes! :)

> With the emulator included, how large is MILO? I assume that it is still
> much smaller than the ARC console?

Just as a reminder: I ran the experiment on top of Linux---the
emulator hasn't been integrated into MILO yet. Debugging the emulator
on Linux is so much easier than doing it within MILO. Once it's
running stably, it should be straight forward to integrate it into
MILO.

Now to your question: there is absolutely no reason to keep the
emulator around once the system is initialized. So, I don't think the
size of the emulator matters much. I'm not sure how big it is right
now, but it will surely be significantly less than 8MB, so even a very
minimal Alpha system will be able to run it.

--david