Physical host - Pure64 enters 64-bit mode, then freezes

[Golffies]

Binaries have been build on macOS, following the instructions in Readme.md.

A boot floppy disk has been prepared as follow:

• Low-level format of the floppy disk; no bad sectors;
• Copy floppy.sys (65 sectors long) to the floppy disk;
• Hash digest of the first 65 sectors:
  MD5 (/dev/fd0) = cbdbeba45610b643bec53028d84a18ac
  MD5 (floppy.sys) = cbdbeba45610b643bec53028d84a18ac

A boot PATA block device has been prepared as follow:

• Copy baremetal_os.img (256MiB) to a PATA CompactFlash card (245 MiB);
• Hash digest of the first 245MiB:
  MD5 (/dev/sdb) = f2c8569c6f10085efbeb31d04ae79903
  MD5 (baremetal_os.img) = f2c8569c6f10085efbeb31d04ae79903

Booting from the floppy disk:

• Boot option (F12): manual selection of the floppy disk;
• The floppy drive motor reads the first track;
• The screen refreshes and an orange dot appears in the middle: Pure64 enters 64-bit mode;
• No further access to the floppy disk;
• No change to the display;
• The boot process does not proceed any further.

Booting from the CF card (in PATA mode):

• Eject the floppy disk from the computer;
• Restart the computer;
• Boot option (F12): manual selection of the PATA CF card;
• The screen refreshes and an orange dot appears in the middle: Pure64 enters 64-bit mode;
• No change to the display;
• The boot process does not proceed any further.

Booting with qemu:

• Using the same build, running ./baremetal.sh run launches BareMetal OS in QEMU on macOS without any issues;
• The three default applications (hello.app, sysinfo.app, systest.app) are present and can be launched.

Test machine configuration:

• Award BIOS
• Intel P43 (ICH10)
• Core 2 Quad (i86_64).

[IanSeyler]

Thanks for submitting this. I've never seen Pure64 hang in that way. It may be stuck in debug_msg. If you pull the latest Pure64 source it no longer tries to use the serial port by default.

[Golffies]

Hello Ian,

Here are the hash digests for the boot images, generated by the current version of baremetal.sh, which I used to run the tests again:

sys % dd bs=512 count=65 if=floppy.sys status=none | md5
327133292478396b92c3886e58e2bc9a
sys % dd bs=1M count=245 if=baremetal_os.img status=none | md5   
8c4812e8b9eb554f54097b66b47a6a1a

In both cases, the boot behaviour is exactly the same, whether using the floppy disk or the PATA drive: Pure64 manages to display its first five progress orange dots (i.e. “Pure64 has configured the BSP”) and does not proceed any further.

BTW, the motherboard is fitted with a single serial port, for which the BIOS configures the I/O at the standard address 0x3f8.

These tests were carried out on the same machine as before.