Why have i suddenly started working on a network stack after a few years of inactivity?
To do this:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BYdy8Xmlq9r/Once upon a time i found this old motherboard on a "old used crap" sale.
It was some sort of a self-contained thin client - some weird Via x86 CPU, Via Rhine network card, 32 Mb of RAM.
And a Disk-on-Chip by M-systems.
That DoC is only 32Mb, and is one of the earliest SSDs.
I long wondered what was on it, and recently decided to figure out what would it take to find out.
The chip was fairly well documented, so writing a driver for it was straightforward.
Getting the data out was a good excuse to finally make a network stack.
The network card is supported by Linux, so i cheated by peeking at it while i wrote a driver for Aprom.
The network stack itself took some time.
After i got a ping working, some time was wasted hunting old architectural bugs and rewriting a bunch of architectural stuff elsewhere.
And finally, after a few false starts i managed to dump the content of the DoC and send it over UDP via a real network card with real driver to another PC.
Sure, i could have just dug up an old Linux distro, slap a DoC patch on it, dump from there, and be done in an hour rather than a few weeks, but what's the fun in that?
And this is how i used my Aprom OS for a real purpose for the first time.