[LispM-Hackers] Microcode...

[James A. Crippen]

Paul Fuqua <pf@ti.com> writes:

[...]
> Once upon a time, that's what one did:  put a load band and a microcode
> band on a disk, flag them as "default" with a magic tool, and the boot
> process would load them up and go.  (In my first weeks as a microcoder,
> I would often build microcodes that didn't work;  in that case I had to
> lug the disk brick to another lab where I could hook it to a handy CADR
> and move the "default" flag to something that worked, then lug it back.)
> 
> I think that would still work, but the "modern" way was to first boot a
> special microcode that would offer a menu of bands to boot, including
> load bands, microcodes, and diagnostics.  Or was it two-stage:  initial
> boot and self-test, which loaded the menu boot?  Fuzzy memory.

Two-stage, I think.  ISTR reading that in SSDN in the early chapters,
or perhaps somewhere else...

IIRC there's a very detailed description of the booting process in
SSDN chapter 2 or 3 or n where n is a small natural number for
suitably small values of small.

The menu boot is fairly primitive, and nothing like the complexity of
Symbolics's FEP.  But it got the job done anyway.

I would like to see a Symbolics-style FEP for E3 in the future that
allows fiddling with the internals of the CPU and modifying memory.
But that can wait.

'james

-- 
James A. Crippen <james@unlambda.com> ,-./-.  Anchorage, Alaska,
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