>>> I'm about to buy a 386 EX SBC Card from universal developers
>>> (www.universal-developers.com). This card has a Intel 386EX with
>>> 2Mbytes DRAM, 2 serial ports, 1 paralele port, 1 interupts
>>> controler, 1 timer, 1 Watchdog timer, 1Mbytes flash PROM with
>>> BIOS and DOS in it.
>>> Do you think I could run linux on it ?
>> No
> Why do you say no ? Everyone says yes !
I can't speak for the original poster, but with only 2M of RAM, I'd
have to agree with him/her. Make that 4M of RAM and you're far more
likely to get a working system though, since I see no other
problems...
>>> Do I need the BIOS, or can Linux do all initialisation alone ?
>> You need the BIOS to boot a stock Linux kernel (in order for it to
>> determine what hardware you have, do PCI scans, etc). This could
>> be avoided if you wrote your own bootloading code.
>>> Is there a driver to access ROM as a block device ? If not can I
>>> use /dev/rom device MAJOR defined in devices.txt for my driver?
>> You'd probably have to write your own driver since its not going
>> to be the standard BIOS PROM. Not too hard.
Whilst a BIOS would come in useful, you wouldn't need one in an
embedded application like that, just enough code to specify the
hardware so Linux gets what it needs. You could probably tweak the
kernel source to not even need that, since the relevant kernel calls
could be replaced with instructions to load the results where the
calls would've put them...
>> However, it's not going to be worth it -- with 2M of RAM Linux is
>> barely bootable. It's not usable.
> Even with a light libc, a tiny init and some little and useful
> programs ?
I can only go on experience, but that indicates that even with a
tightly customised kernel and a minimal libc, you'd soon be over 2M.
How easy would it be to get the board fitted with 4M instead of 2M, or
does the board take standard SIMM's ???
Best wishes from Riley.
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