"Eric W. Biederman" wrote:
> Ronald G Minnich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
> > On Thu, 10 May 2001, David Chow wrote:
> >
> > > > On Wed, 9 May 2001, David Chow wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > I wonder does the Linux bios detect other XT roms in the bus and boot
> > > > > them at all? Does it provide INT13 routines for compatibility?
> > > >
> > > > no INT13. No other roms. Those other roms are just not needed.
> > > >
> > > > ron
> > >
> > > But what about compatibility? If you all manufacturers as well as me, you
> > > have to provide a int13 routines in order to compatible with other OS. It
> > > is very hard to presuade people to use the bios unless you have good
> > > compatibility.
> >
> > right now we support linux. We will be supporting all flavors of BSD.
> >
> > It's not legal to put NT into flash, so we can't.
> >
> > Booting NT, if it ever happens, will happen via linux somehow.
> >
> > Windows Me, 98, 95, XP, DOS: we just don't care.
>
> Mostly true. The current design does allow for compatibility, but
> as an add-on, instead of a core component. You boot something that loads
> a backwards compatibility layer. That backwards compatibility layer
> if good enough will let you run DOS & NT.
>
> linuxBIOS addresses 2 sets of problems.
>
> 1) Current BIOS's are too complex to get right, in the limited time
> they are being manufactured. Inevitably there problems in odd areas.
> LinuxBIOS throws out the backwards compatibility crap resulting in
> something noticeably cleaner.
>
> 2) Current BIOS's don't do interesting things like let you change the
> configuration on hudreds of machines remotely with a single
> command. Embed your application in the BIOS so you don't even need
> a disk. Boot to a useful state in seconds. Workaround hardware
> bugs, the manufacture doesn't care about.
>
> With linuxBIOS doing a very simple boot of linux this kind of thing
> becomes an almost trivial exercise.
>
> As for DOS. I don't much care. But I do care about making certain we
> aren't tied too tightly to linux. The ideal exercise to test a
> compatibility layer would be to boot freedos. Or possibly just hack
> freedos so it doesn't need a BIOS. I'm highly tempted to work on
> this...
>
> But to really go somewhere you need to provide a reason why what you
> are doing is intrisically better at some thing then the competition.
> LinuxBIOS has this in spades. So we don't need compatibilty to
> persuade people to use LinuxBIOS.
>
> Eric
I felt that LinuxBios make assumption you are using DOC (DiskOnChip), on the
other hand, there are much cheaper solution and even better than DOC. This is
what I am planning to do. We are concerning a removable storage flash media to
give more flexibility of our hardware. If we use LinuxBios to load linux, and
then use Linux to load something, you assumed DOC is availble to store linux or
the BIOS is large enough to provide all the facilities. Since most of the
bootloader today uses INT13. Our flash media compatible with ATA IDE so that we
are now quite happy to stay in my current setup. The only thing I am worrying is
that the Award BIOS takes too long to get to the boot loader. Now I can load any
operating systems with my firmware.
David
