On 7 Feb, Ronald G Minnich wrote:
> On 7 Feb 2001, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
>
>> Do we make linuxBIOS a subroutine library or do we make it a tightly
>> focused first booter that can get you into a linux kernel in the rom
>> that can do the hard work.
>
> well, you need a subroutine library to build the tightly focused first
> booter.
>
> The way I've been trying to think of it is that we have a set of .c files,
> some subset of which are compiled to build the first booter. The subset is
> selected by the Config files.
>
> I'm not sure I know what the distinction you're getting to is.
Put me on the list of people not sure what the distinction is. There
are some things that need to be in the "bios" and somethings that don't
need to be there. Those that don't need to be there should be done in
the kernel. For those that do need to be in the bios we can do one of
two things:
1 - Write an intel_main() and linuxbiosmain() that does everything and
has enought #ifdef's in it to be able to configure it for anything.
2 - Have subroutines to make it easy to write a custom intel_main and
linuxbiosmain().
Option one seems doomed to eventually fall apart and/or require a lot
of people to hack the source code for where it doesn't meet their
needs. Option two is inherently configurable to do pretty much
anything.
The current implementations of intel_main() and linuxbiosmain() are
lacking for what I need to do. It happens that I can hi-jack
intel_main() by having my mainboard_fixup() never return, but call
linuxbiosmain() instead. However, this is ugly and sure to end up
conflicting with someone's changes somewhere if it isn't the accepted
practice.
Ty
--
Tyson D Sawyer iRobot Corporation
Senior Systems Engineer Real World Interface Div.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Robots for the Real World
603-532-6900 ext 206 http://www.irobot.com
