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To: "Daniel C. Sobral" <dcs@newsguy.com>
Cc: Ronald G Minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: freebsd bios. 
In-Reply-To: Message from "Daniel C. Sobral" <dcs@newsguy.com> 
   of "Tue, 20 Jun 2000 07:06:36 +0900." <394E996C.EF72B68F@newsguy.com> 
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Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2000 15:17:59 -0700
Message-ID: <66205.961453079@pinhead.parag.codegen.com>
From: Parag Patel <parag@cgt.com>
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On Tue, 20 Jun 2000 07:06:36 +0900, "Daniel C. Sobral" wrote:
>
>And, in the process, they are teaching the firmware about Ext2FS,
>Ext3FS, RheiserFS, (in our case) ffs, vinum, etc, so it can find the
>kernel in whatever place it is, or resorting to some sort of bootfs
>(though any software RAID would still have to be taught), with it's
>inherent disadvantages?

Well, it's more of a matter of putting the kernel itself into the boot
ROM with some small assembly/C code to turn on DRAM and an ungzipper to
load and run it.  It's fairly simple, other than dealing with the
various motherboard/chipset vagaries.

It's possible to make a complete BIOS based on Linux that in turn loads
and boots another kernel, but that I don't think that this is what the
LinuxBIOS folks are attempting.

Instead they have (or will have) access to the flash from within Linux
to load a kernel directly into flash (along with its startup code)
rather than placing it into /.  (Please correct me if I'm wrong.)

Personally, I'd set it up to hold two kernel images - one for testing
and one for emergency recovery.  If a bad kernel gets into the flash,
recovering will be ...  painful.  But there may not be enough room.


	-- Parag Patel


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