[Info-vax] Itanium boot menus, was: Re: WIN AN RX2660 ~~~THE GREAT INTEGRITY GIVE AWAY !!!

[Simon Clubley]

On 2014-09-02, Paul Sture <nospam at sture.ch> wrote:
> On 2014-09-02, Simon Clubley <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> wrote:
>>
>> It's functional, it will only require a (relatively) small amount of
>> code to implement and presumably it boots from an onboard flash chip
>> which means you have a fixed amount of space for the boot code.
>
> Fair comment.  Having owned more than one Alpha PWS system, a more important
> consideration is that it doesn't try to boot into BIOS/Windows when the
> internal battery goes flat.
>
>> How big is the onboard flash for the Itanium systems and do you
>> really want to waste a part of it implementing a pretty GUI ?
>
> Dunno and nope.  I feel suitably chastised :-)
>

Don't be. :-)

When doing embedded work (even as a hobbyist) you rapidly become
aware of how design decisions change the final size of a binary
especially when the end result is intended to be placed inside
a fixed size flash memory.

There's a size command (from whatever cross compiled binutils is in
use) at the end of every makefile I use to build an embedded project.

It serves as a reminder of how the final image size compares to the
available resources on the target circuit/MCU and also gives me
immediate feedback on how code changes affect the size of the final
image code and data.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world