What to include in a NitrOS 9 Boot File - nealcrook/multicomp6809 GitHub Wiki

The bootfile stays in memory for the life of the session; there is no way to unstitch parts of it. For Level 1, the restricted amount of memory means that the bootfile should only contain what's necessary to boot the system. For Level 2, the additional memory made available by the MMU means that you may not need to be so determined to restrict what's present.

At one point, I planned to make 2 different disks for mc09 Level 2: one without drivewire (DW) support and one with. In the end though, I decided that it was sufficient to just do the "without" version. It's possible to load the DW stuff later. The only reason to have a DW version would be if DW was required for the boot process, and I don't have that as a goal: we always need the SD card to be present, so we should do the whole boot from there.

To load DW later (explanation from Kip)

  1. append all the driver and associated descriptor modules into a file:
> merge driver descriptor1 [descriptor2..]>somename
  1. make it executable:
> attr somename e pe
  1. load it:
> load somename

You can see all of the loaded modules like this:

> mdir

You can remove a module from memory like this:

> unlink somename

You should only unlink modules that have been placed in memory by use of load.