OSDev.org

Does anyone else find it very frustrating trying to find a specific technical reference for so and so or datasheets for a specific chip? Well I do, and I think once your OS starts to get into the driver developement phase you'd be searching mindlessly and perhaps countless emails to manufactures for thier documents. So, I thought it would be a lot of time saving if the OS community have our own vault.

The purpose -a reliable reference vault for the community, saves us hassles such as trying to determin what is the best documented device to support in your OS, saves us from sending 100s emails to manufactors to get one freaken technical manual, and saves us from mad googling. If MT does not want to host this, is there anyone that is willing to? Further, I believe the database will be very large so please keep that in mind. I also suggest we only keep manuals for x86 architecture devices/chips only.

Or is there already a good large database of manuals out there already? Assuming there is one out there, even so we wouldn't be able to pool up our documents which would be more suited for the OS dev community. Any commnents welcomed..

Well there's always the Bona Fide documents list and the (on the same site) massive Cottontail list. I did a mass-grab of them all and I'm still sorting them, lol.

oh, and if you're to run a new vault for this, make it a torrent ;D

The cottontail list is a nice one, but there are some device manuals I have and not listed there. Which is why this would be really handy as a community and not for a specific project, since the idea is anyone can fill in the gaps. I think its mostly the ones that we send emails to manufactures will really benifit, usually the really old device/chip or really new.

I was thinking of just plain old FTP, so popular browsers can browse and capable of uploads by anyone. And its easy to mass grab.

You can mass grab with torrents - just put everything in one file

Anyway, if everybody would mass grab off your server you could suffer from bandwidth limitations, given some thousand files of 1-2 mb and a cheap line...

I do think its a good idea to have an user-contributed database, since thats something cottontail hasn't got. Besides its "Last updated on 10/2/2002" so its pretty much dead.
Maybe its useful to link people to some of the docs so you can find people who share hardware that are willing to test (without scavenging Test Beds for potential matches), but that's my idea.

Let me know if you want my collection of gathered stuff or you have more complete plans.