Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2000 08:13:27 -0600 From: Ronald G Minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov> To: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Anybody working on FreeBSD BIOS? Message-ID: <Pine.SGI.4.10.10006190805350.883539-100000@acl.lanl.gov> In-Reply-To: <20000619114515.A64102@mithrandr.moria.org>
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On Mon, 19 Jun 2000, Neil Blakey-Milner wrote: > On Thu 2000-06-15 (15:25), Ronald G Minnich wrote: > 'linuxbios' will only support booting off Linux partitions? linuxbios is getting to be a misnomer, but ... linuxbios is a simple chunk of FLASH-based code that gunzips a kernel image to RAM. That's it. It doesn't do much of anything but get DRAM turned on (not hard) and some other bits that OSes don't yet do well. Although, I am finding that increasingly the open source OSes are taking on more and more hardware tasks because so many BIOSes screw up hardware config. The APIC support in the more recent kernels is pretty amazing. LinuxBIOS DOES NOT: 1) read disks 2) talk to network cards 3) etc. It knows how to get ram up, it is mostly written in C (except for that 'get ram up' part, obviously), and it counts on the OS to do the heavy lifting. It works on two very different motherboards. We're working on an Alpha port now. Our long term goal is not to control this thing. Best case scenario is the vendors buy in and support it directly. We have one case in hand where this is happening. Mainboards from this one vendor will ship with LinuxBIOS in flash. We have a couple of industrial partners at this point, including a new one that just wrote me this morning who you would recognize (you'll see their name on the web page in a week or so). I would love to see FreeBSD support work. I can't do it much anymore, since unfortunately the HPC cluster community seems less and less concerned with FreeBSD nowadays, which I think is a tragedy. But I'll do what I can. ron To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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