ELKS on Book 8088 (original) (raw)

Description
I have a new and shiny laptop based on the 8088 processor. You can read about the Book 8088 on arstechnica. It's a fascinating device that allows for easy CPU changes. I've already tried the V20, Intel 8088, and a Soviet clone of the 8088, and they all work well in DOS. However, I'm currently having trouble getting it to boot ELKS out of the box.

UPDATE: About hardware details see the blogpost in the comment #1619 (comment)

UPDATE2: More hardware details from Sergey Kiselev:

The schematic of Book8088 is quite interesting.
In addition to the 8088 CPU and the 8087 FPU, it uses an original 8284 clock generator, 8288 bus controller, 8237 DMA controller, 8259 PIC, and 8253 PIT
It looks that they've got most of the discrete logic functionality for an XT motherboard into a CPLD, also the CGA controller functionality is implemented as two CPLDs and the original 6845 CRT controller. According to the pinout, the CPLDs seem to be Altera MAX7000S series or Atmel ATF1500AS series in PLCC84 package.
They also use some kind of microcontroller to implement the XT keyboard, that is interfaced directly to the XT motherboard logic CPLD
The system uses two EPROMs (why not flash ROMs?!) - one 27C512 for the BIOS, and one 27C256 for CGA font
The system memory uses one 512KB SRAM and one 128 KB SRAM chip. CGA uses a 32 KB SRAM for the video RAM

Another technical detail, the data bus of all 82xx controllers, the XT logic CPLD, and the memory are connected directly to the CPU data transceiver. This probably will reduce reliability when using external ISA cards. Typically, these things sit behind an additional transceiver...

Configuration

• Version (commit or release): ELKS v0.6.0 release image hd32-fat.img and hd32mbr-fat.img. Minix versions give identical results.
• Screenshot(s):
  hd32-fat.img starts to boot a little bit:
  
  hd32mbr-fat.img doesn't boot:
  

Additional information

• I suspect that CHS is probably wrong but Book 8088 has no FDD so I can not follow the procedure. Instead I use analyze_mbr.c to read the three CHS bytes of the DOS disk which boots fine:

sudo ./a.out /dev/sdd
** Opening drive /dev/sdd..
** MBR magic bytes in place!
** Analyzing Partition 0
    This is bootable
    Partition is 995967 sectors (486.31MB)
    Starting CHS values C=1, H=1, S=0
    Ending   CHS values C=254, H=63, S=61
    Partition starts at sector number 63 (31.00KB in)
    Partition filesystem id is 6
** Analyzing Partition 1
    This is not bootable
    Is an empty partition
** Analyzing Partition 2
    This is not bootable
    Is an empty partition
** Analyzing Partition 3
    This is not bootable
    Is an empty partition

ELKS gives me parameters which are different:

$ sudo dd if=/media/ubuntu/3.0Tb/1/15/Book8088/hd32mbr-fat.img of=/dev/sdd bs=1024
31783+1 records in
31783+1 records out
32546304 bytes (33 MB, 31 MiB) copied, 14.187 s, 2.3 MB/s

$ sudo ./a.out /dev/sdd
** Opening drive /dev/sdd..
** MBR magic bytes in place!
** Analyzing Partition 0
    This is bootable
    Partition is 63504 sectors (31.01MB)
    Starting CHS values C=1, H=1, S=0
    Ending   CHS values C=16, H=63, S=63
    Partition starts at sector number 63 (31.00KB in)
    Partition filesystem id is 128
** Analyzing Partition 1
    This is not bootable
    Is an empty partition
** Analyzing Partition 2
    This is not bootable
    Is an empty partition
** Analyzing Partition 3
    This is not bootable
    Is an empty partition