Re: [f-cpu] spec draft about booting F-CPU

[Yann Guidon <whygee@f-cpu.org>]

hi !

i answer this mail first because it's the shortest :-)

Ben Franchuk wrote:

> Cedric BAIL wrote:
>
>>> when the CPU boots, VM and paging is not yet configured.
>>
>> Right, but they will be quickly activated when we need memory, and I 
>> hope
>> that we didn't need more than 1 MB for the boot process !
>
> Well why can't VM and paging be configured on boot? 

it's the user's choice.
VM is mostly useful when dealing with multiple programs
but boot is single-threaded, dealing with HW resources
at the highest priviledge access rights.
there is no need for VM at this time.
When the boot code starts the kernel, the memory
must also be in a specific, stable state so the kernel
can install its own VM.

> You would have a system dump/restore mode that dumps
> all the register contents. Also 1 MB is very small to boot
> from nowdays --- look how big the linux kernal is.

then larger EPROM will allow to store several kernels :-)
along with a simple multiboot utility.

> Also would not splitting the CPU in to smaller segments
> like CPU only Memory Management, I/O and Basic OS functions
> handeled by other well abstracted CPU blocks? 

can you elaborate, please ?

YG

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