[Info-vax] X86 first boot? - A Really Stupid Question

[Michael Moroney]

Simon Clubley <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> writes:

>On 2019-03-29, Dave Froble <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>>
>> So, if many of the device drivers have been re-written by VSI, perhaps 
>> they could make them available.  Whether they would do so is another 
>> question.

>Something more than the existing LRDRIVER would be nice. :-)

>>  Whether they could or would make documentation available so 
>> third parties could write drivers might be a good question.
>>

>That's actually a rather good question.

>When people write drivers for Itanium VMS at the moment, what information
>sources do they use ?

>Is the Writing OpenVMS Alpha Device Drivers in C book still the starting
>point for Itanium ?

The generic stuff is valid, but the hardware-specific stuff isn't, if a HW driver.

I wrote a sort of template disk driver a couple years ago using that book, my 
knowledge, the example DQDRIVER.C and LRDRIVER, with the idea that perhaps it
could be in SYS$EXAMPLES one day. I avoided existing sources for that reason.

By template I mean it has all the generic disk-specific stuff like FDTs and one can
add a few hardware-specific routines and be good to go. I tested it by making it a
memory disk (not the same memory disk that will be used for X86 boot) and then used
the memory disk for testing for the >2TB disk project (by faking lots of stuff out)
before I got some real terabytes.  I even made a frankenstein driver by welding it
to DUDRIVER (MSCP served driver) and it sort of worked. Now too busy for such stuff.