Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2000 11:49:45 -0700 (PDT) From: Scott Hess <scott@avantgo.com> To: Ronald G Minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov> Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Anybody working on FreeBSD BIOS? Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.21.0006191145520.10933-100000@river.avantgo.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.SGI.4.10.10006190805350.883539-100000@acl.lanl.gov>
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On Mon, 19 Jun 2000, Ronald G Minnich wrote: > 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. <snip> > 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. Hmm. It seems like it would just make more sense for the motherboard manufacturers to (a) fix their BIOS's to allow serial-port access, and (b) provider more flash where you can stuff a "disk" image to boot from, with appropriate support for accessing it as an IDE or floppy drive. That way it works with all versions of all operating systems (well, only those that can do the serial console stuff, of course). Doing LinuxBIOS seems like the long way around, here. I can't imagine that serial-port BIOS access hasn't happened because it's too hard - it's just because BIOS makers don't care. Nonetheless, it is a cool notion, scott To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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