Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2000 16:55:50 -0600 (MDT) From: Ronald G Minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov> To: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: freebsd bios. Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.20.0006191638430.636-100000@mini.acl.lanl.gov> In-Reply-To: <66205.961453079@pinhead.parag.codegen.com>
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On Mon, 19 Jun 2000, Parag Patel wrote: > It's fairly simple, other than dealing with the > various motherboard/chipset vagaries. So far those vagaries are not much code, something like 200 lines tops. > 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. Actually, we aren't attempting it, we've got it working. see the LOBOS paper on the www.linuxbios.org web page. One option is that we start linux from NVRAM, talk to a DHCP server, and as a result we suck a kernel down over the network and boot it. Linux (or FreeBSD) make far more capable network boot programs than such things as PXE. And LinuxBIOS is SMALLER than the Intel BIOS it replaces. You can get complicated. LinuxBIOS loads, talks to DHCP, is sent some KLDs, the KLDs drive the boot device, and so on. So the thing in NVRAM can be little more than a netboot. A number: sun's net bootstrap is 200K. > 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.) You have both options. We're going to use them. > 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. There will be enough in future, next generation mainboards have 2 MB or more flash. My cheap DFI mainboard at home has 2 MB flash. For now, there is enough room in current mainboards, and more to come (I am told that the current driver for flash is MP3 players, which only demand more and more and more and ...) ron To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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