Last month's (initial) plan got halted and then changed by the waves of the tumult spreading further, followed by a shift in perspective and immediate objectives within TMSR. In other words: that other work I was going to do was deemed "not that much of a priority", so the only major item1 in my M11 was the Cuntoo bootstrapper notepad -- not sure that's going anywhere either, since meanwhile TMSR-OS management changed and there seems to be an alternative out there, different in some respects, and currently in need of further examination2.
Now, the first week of M12 is already gone and I've done nothing but lying in bed and literally spurting out shit and whatnot through all the major holes I have. So now that that's gone, let's see what else is there.
For one, I'm looking for a new apartment to rent in this town by the end of the month and syncing up with brokers and viewing places is already eating up at least an hour of my time daily. For the other, I'll be on holiday this year's last week and the first week of 2020, which on one hand will give me days of increased productivity, given that I'll be away from saecular pits, and on the other it will result in a few days of complete lack of productivity, overall a good occasion to rest and maybe get out on some adventures there... a productivity of a different kind, as it were.
As far as work on the yet-infant TMSR-OS project goes, there's already plenty of discussion going on and the first order of business is to get it all organized in my head and lay out what I see as the main priorities. I've already committed to documenting the current state of BIOS and bootloaders, mainly because this is where the first line is drawn with respect to hardware support -- thus, an understanding what the spec says, what it doesn't say and how this translates to concrete motherboard software implementations is in my opinion much needed. I'll begin by studying the UEFI specs: given that the latest version of the standard weighs almost 2600 pdf pages, the short-term plan is to get an overview of the basics and then focus on the UEFI 1-2 distinction. It's hard to say at the moment how much this will take me, maybe a week or two, but by now I fancy myself wise enough to stop and report my findings before throwing myself into rabbit holes.
As mentioned in the second note, I'd also like to take a look at JFW's Gales release. The current plan is to get a system up and running by the end of the year, but I'll have to review the priority for this item once I'm done with the previous one.
Finally, there's other issues that I need to fix, which shouldn't take more than a couple of hours, but either way, this is the last item on the list. So while '20 is almost here... let's hope that I find some interesting shit to report!
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I also worked on and published two minor items, the feed bot spec and some changes to The Tar Pit's MP-WP theme. ↩
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At least as far as I'm concerned. I'd personally very much like to take a look at this, in the way I looked at Trinque's bootstrapper. The two could then be compared along the lines that bothered me the most, at the very least. ↩
FTR my own machine fleet (incl. hostism offerings) is 100% UEFI-free.
I very much liked your cuntoo bootstrapper notes and will schedule time before this month to carry out your method.
Carry out your test of Gales with the same QEMU + Debian Wheezy environment with same CPU provisioning that you finally settled on.
End of the year timeline is good for now, let's see how things look once uefi-1/2 mapping is further.
Thanks for the update on holiday, I hope they're enjoyably productive on many fronts.
Sounds like a good short-term plan. How does an article outlining the basics and introducing the uefi 1-2 disctinction sound for an initial delivierable ? What'd be your timeline on that ?
Sounds good, brief updates as you go and things clarify would be good.
Glad you're recovering from the illness, Cheers.
Hmmm, esti bine?
@Diana Coman: Sorry for the radio silence, I didn't expect the meat portion of this plan to get me almost completely offline.
The "at least an hour of time daily" estimate for the apartment search was way under the real value. This took more like three hours on average, with some days going well over four hours. But at least it's given me something to write about.
@Robinson Dorion: Your comment's been marked as spam for some reason -- first time this happens to me, too, not sure what prompted that behaviour.
The current plan is to use the same method as Cuntoo, adjusting where needed. Hard to say at the moment whether this will take one day or ten, but I'm eager to try it out regardless.
Unfortunately I'm currently behind on that front (was hoping to have a first report last Friday) due to poor time estimates. From my notes as they currently stand, there doesn't seem to be an explicit UEFI 1/2 comparison in the specs, which means that I might have to approach the whole thing from another angle -- the separation is there, it might be just that legacy support meanwhile became optional or something. From my reading of the documentation so far, it's all vague enough, which explains my past experiences with motherboards which booted CDs/DVDs in legacy mode, but USB devices only in UEFI mode -- it all depends on what drivers the BIOS implements in each mode and I'm guessing it's the vendor's choice when it comes to that.
Anyway, my current plan is to lay out some principles and systematically sort all this out, then use it as a starting point for e.g. enumerating motherboards/BIOS software/whatever works to delimit TMSR-supported hardware from all the rest.
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