Date: Thu, 15 Jun 2000 21:42:48 -0400 From: Sergey Babkin <babkin@bellatlantic.net> To: Ronald G Minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov>, hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Anybody working on FreeBSD BIOS? Message-ID: <39498618.103CC6AB@bellatlantic.net> References: <Pine.SGI.4.10.10006151622481.175399-100000@acl.lanl.gov> <394985D1.9E8E4DC0@bellatlantic.net>
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Ronald G Minnich wrote: > > On Thu, 15 Jun 2000, Sergey Babkin wrote: > > > Maybe I'm completely mistunderstanding the subject, but > > what about EFI (Extendable Firmware Interface) ? It's the > > We're looking at it. Do you really believe in reference implementations? I > don't. I sure hope they've stopped zeroing memory on reset ... this is one > of the drivers for linuxbios. Well, supposedly that reference implementation is what's inside the Itanium boxes (actually the box I have access too has version 0.92 while the latest one is 0.99). Though maybe the published code is not complete. > > But it is still interesting. As far as I understand the idea is that you won't need to replace the BIOS. It should have some limited pseudo-disk in flash memory with a FAT-32 partition on it where the drivers and loaders can be added as needed. Any kind of clustering initialization, or boot loaders can be written as applications in EFI API. If that's not enough then a special boot FAT-32 partition may be created on a disk (on any disk, may create one (or maybe many - not sure) on each disk) where the rest will be stored. BTW, EFI permits unlimited number of partitions on the disk with size limited by 64-bit sector number. Microsoft has contributed the FAT-32 code for the free reference implementation for free. For example, Linux-64 stores it kernel, boot loader and boot parameters file in this boot partition. EFI also has a mini-shell which gives some rudimentary control from the console, and yes, it supposedly supports the serial console. I don't quite understand it yet (one of the features is that the result of "help" command scrolls very fast, so only the last screen can be seen) but I plan to look closer at it. -SB To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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