Flashing my new BIOS's

My stationary computer started acting up and would not let me reinstall an operating system on it a couple of weeks back. After replacing most of the peripheral devices without any luck I decided to buy a new motherboard, CPU, RAM etc.

I ended up with a Gigabyte MA790FX-DS5, running a AMD Phenom 9850 and 4GB of Corsair RAM. I choose a low end videocard, Sapphire Radeon HD 2400, since I'm not much of a gamer anymore.

The Radeon card seems to be non-compliant with my Dell 20" monitor, and refuses to display an image using DVI cable. I got it working with a S-VHS cable, but the graphics are horrible. I see that Sapphire has released a new BIOS for the videocard claiming to "(...)fix bug with Samsung DVI-D(...)". Hopefully it'll also work with my DVI-D monitor.

Flashing a BIOS isn't always straightforward. Finding out HOW you flash, that is.
After googling around I found a way to flash my motherboards BIOS, and I'll put the receipe here for my own future reference.

I tried using the @BIOS application to flash the Gigabyte card. Didn't work. Couldn't connect to any of the online servers.

I also tried the ActiveX driven Download Center on the Gigabyte website. No luck.

Here is what I ended up with:
1. Download new BIOS from MA790FX-DS5 page. My old BIOS was F5, and the newest available was F6.
2. Extracted the files onto a floppy disk.
3. Rebooted computer and pressed END to get to QFlash application.
4. Choose floppy drive, and the .F6 file.
Flashing complete.

Now for finding out how to flash the ROM on the Radeon card.

Which driver?

After coming back from lunch today I was greeted with this dialog on my fully patched 2008 Server:


Huh? Which driver is it complaining about? I even clicked the "See details" linklabel, but it doesn't give any more relevant information?

Who designed this dialog? Why didn't anyone of the dialog-approving-committee over at Redmond raise their hand and say "Shouldn't we show the name of the driver?".

Sometimes I don't get people...

Fortunately I remember starting installation of VMWare Server before going to lunch, so I assume it is a VMWare network driver it is trying to install. I can't be sure, but I'm taking my chances.

I'll just click the "Install this driver software anyway" - otherwise known as the "I want to work today button".

Calculating remaining time

It might sound strange, but one feature I really like in an application is the ability to estimate remaining time. Wheter it is the time it will take to install an application, copy a file or perform another lengthy process.

The last time I came across such an application was while installing TrueCrypt. It has a fantastic timer which updates itself continously during the installation.

Here is a method I wrote for Cosmos for determining how much time remains for compiling the operating system. The method takes two arguments, one for how far we've come in the process, and one for the total length of the process.

The major strength of this method is that it continously recalculates how much time remains. So no more "1 second remaining" for minutes, or grossely missing the target by estimating years to copy a single file.

public static System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch xBuildTimer;

public TimeSpan CalculateRemainingTime(int completedCount, int totalCount)

{

    if (xBuildTimer == null)

    {

        xBuildTimer = new System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch();

        xBuildTimer.Start();

    }

    long percentComplete = (completedCount * 100 / totalCount);

    if (percentComplete == 0) //Avoid Divide by Zero

        percentComplete = 1;

    long remaining = (xBuildTimer.ElapsedMilliseconds / percentComplete) 

        * (100 - percentComplete);

    return new TimeSpan(remaining * 10000);

}

The joy of Extension Methods in C# 3.0

I discovered a new addition to C# 3.0 called Method Extension while I was writing a convertor for Hex and Binary for Cosmos today. Method Extension is a technique for "spot-welding" methods on to existing classes or types.

    //Without C# 3.0 Method Extension

    if (IsOdd(7))

        ;

    //With C# 3.0 Method Extension

    if (7.IsOdd())

        ;

Here the I've added the IsOdd method onto an integer type. I think the lower example is a lot easier to read than the upper.

Adding an extended method is as simple as adding 'this' keyword on the first parameter on a static method inside a static class, like this:

    public static class IntExtender

    {

        /// 

        /// Checks if number is odd or even.

        /// 

        public static bool IsOdd(this int n)

        {

            if ((n % 2) > 0)

                return true;

            else

                return false;

        }

    }

Method Extensions requires a reference to System.Data.Core assembly in your project.

The Intellisense looks like this:

By adding extensions in Cosmos we can now directly convert numbers to Hex and Binary like this:

    foreach (byte b in bytes) 

    {

        Console.Write(b.ToBinary());

        Console.Write(b.ToHex());

    }

Progress and whatnot

Those who really know me, i.e. my precious Julie, know that when I find something I find funny I do it. A lot.

So for the last few days I've been totally focused on Cosmos, and have made some significant changes dare I say. The network driver for RTL 8139 became stable enough to send proper packets the other day. Yey!

Today I added support for VMWare Server (since we only had VMWare Workstation from before). The VMW Server hasn't got an RTL network card, so for now we are only able to send networkpackets from Qemu and physical machines with RTL NIC's.

Oh, did I mention that the RTL can't receive packets yet? A mono-NIC if you will. Once I understand IRQ's in Cosmos (and we get that darn "Invalid Opcode" bug out of the way) we can hopefully get a fully functional network card.

It would be awesome if we could get two Cosmos machines talking to each other before Chad goes to Egypt to present Cosmos at Microsoft Egypt's EDC, Egyptian Developers Conference in April.

Mention on the Cosmos blog

The Cosmos project has a blog - and darnit - I got my 15 minutes of fame.

For those of you who doesn't yet know what Cosmos is it's a framework for writing Operating Systems in C#. Within minutes you can have your own custom operating system up and running. The C# code you write is converted into IL by Visual Studio, and then converted to Assembly/Machine code by Cosmos.

Today Chad "Kudzu" Hower, a Microsoft MVP and one of the founders of the Cosmos project, implemented USB support. That means that you build directly from Visual Studio 2008 onto a USB memorystick, and then you can boot your Operating System directly from the memorystick.

Network support is still more unstable than a cow balancing on a 15 feet pole stacked on a football, but still...

Network packet sent from Cosmos

I've been working on network support in Cosmos for some days now, and actually got a breakthrough this evening. A packet, although with invalid data, has been sent onto a virtual network!

Here is a screenshot of Wireshark (former Ethereal) which sniffs a packet from a virtual TAP -WIN32 networkcard connected together with Cosmos' RTL8139C+ NIC.


The next step is to get correct data to be sent, and also to receive packets.