[TUHS] 386BSD on Bochs & Qemu...

[Jacob Goense]

On Mon, April 26, 2010 07:22 "Jason Stevens" <neozeed at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well I've been able to find this much out...
>
> The CD has some kind of weird 'live' CD filesystem to it... It would
> seem that 386BSD 1.0 demanded you have an Adaptec 1542 controller
> hooked up, and with special roms & whatnot it could 'boot' from the
> CD...
> Needless to say, this predates anything like IDE CDROM's or or what
> most emulators will emulate.

That "Bootable CD" button on the CD cover is just a marketing fact
AFAICT. I don't have the foggiest how that was done in the pre eltorito
days on an x86.

> That being said, they did include the 'boot' program which is touched
> on in the magazine series, as a MS-DOS bootloader.

Mock code aside, no source code for boot.exe. No source code for the
install program and no Tiny 386BSD Release 1.0 boot floppy image on the
CD. I can't get my head around why they bothered to document to the
point where you can almost port BSD to a Commodore 64 and leave these
bits out.

> So I've just slapped together a MS-DOS floppy, with the boot & 386bsd
> kernel and tried it on on Qemu, to an early kernel panic.

After numerous attect vectors I took the MS-DOS5 floppy route w/ Qemu
as well, but nothing could get it to boot cdrom. Then in a recalcitrant
mood I stuck the image to -hdb, an empty 1G drive to -hda, booted flop
and gave a BOOT.EXE 386BSD.DDB wd1d at the DOS prompt and booted into
The 386BSD SAMPLER. The installer ran fine as long as it didn't have
to deal with swap space. Not that it left me with a bootable system,
but it's a start. Will document on gunkies.org if I can get things
stable.

> I'll have to test later if it can 'mount' an ISO image that's been
> 'dd''d to a hard disk.....

Skip the dd'ing, Qemu eats the image raw ;)

/Jacob