There is some mention of battery backed ram or CMOS in the mailing
list. Now that there is no standard PC
BIOS, this ram is available, right? The clock could be used to wake the
system from S5 suspend, and that's another topic,
but what could the CMOS be used for now? A few ideas, please add to
this list!
- store kernel command line, ie root fs, etc. maybe store some as byte
like cat zImage > /dev/fd0 type kernels store video mode,
root fs major/minor, read-only flag, etc. to save space in nvram.
-a simple runlevel switch, ala /dev/initctl on parallel port... doesn't
take much to init this interface? a simple switch/status lights,
could tell linuxbios to pull up LILO-like prompt for cmd-line, or just
immediately.
(some MB's have 4 dual-color led's... that's 8 bits - hooked up to POST
port, there must be some cheap way for a few INPUTS)
-console password?
-console video params (for fixed frequency monitor people),
-net boot info?
-non volatile global system state info... like last power state, was
kernel core dumped last reboot, time of power off (updated by watchdog),
suspend-to-disk status, ??, post error-log (last POST port byte
written?)
