13 comments
For those of us who like seeing old OSs running on old bare metal to a daft extent, a YouTuber "Omores" is worth a look:
https://www.youtube.com/@O_mores
He has videos on this driver running on NT and 2000.
I thought this github repo looked familiar :)
Assuming performance doesn't matter too much, isn't it easier to run all of windows NT/2k/XP as a UEFI application, using UEFI for all storage access?
A basic driver to link the NT disk device interface to the UEFI interface shouldn't be too hard I assume.
Windows XP only supports UEFI because of some excellent hacks[1]. Haven't seen anything for NT or 2k beyond some preliminary testing[2].
[1]https://msfn.org/board/topic/186793-csmwrap-boot-csm-on-uefi...
[2]https://msfn.org/board/topic/183745-is-it-possible-to-boot-w...
UEFI is a weird environment. I'm not sure you can take an off the shelf OS and turn it into a UEFI application, because of things that are missing or restricted versus running standalone. But once you exit UEFI bootservices, you lose most of what UEFI provides, like storage access.
Easier would probably be running something like a single guest hypervisor that would essentially translate the storage (and NICs) into an interface the OS understood.
Looking at that person's repo you'll also find NVME drivers for SGI Irix.
I wonder how much further back he can take it. NT4 and NT3.51 would be really cool to see supported.
Omores did a video on it with NT 4.0, and the description says it does also work with NT 3.5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvT9-ZfW1Iw
Wow, imagine seeing this just after booting up my PWS running NT (and RH Linux...). NT 4, but one day I do want to try 2k.
My immediate question which isn't (I think) answered in the repo is how do you interface the NVMe? Can you put NVMe on PCI as opposed to PCIe? How?
In the meantime, I'll just add the desire to do this to the other Alpha-related intrusive thoughts I have, like getting that port of OpenSolaris/Illumos to Alpha to run...
> My immediate question which isn't (I think) answered in the repo is how do you interface the NVMe? Can you put NVMe on PCI as opposed to PCIe? How?
PCI to PCIe adapter and then PCIe to M.2: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=78987 (PCIe has some level of backwards compatibility, although like that thread shows there are some limits as to what will work).
This does work on a compaq DS10. You can't boot directly from it but linux will see the nvme disk right away from a livecd.
Is this "just because" fun project or made out of a need?
Disclaimer mentions:
No warranty provided
Use at your own risk
I guess the same can be said about the OS itself :)
Are there any software project having any warranties?