I just got off the phone with a rep from one of the "Big" BIOS vendors. Among some other things we got to talking about BIOS boot times and how Microsoft is offering what he called "carrots" to the BIOS vendors if they make thier BIOSs boot fast.
He was throwing around numbers like a 15 second boot and on some new fangled high end Intel chipset with a 7200 rpm drive they got the boot time down to 5.9 seconds. I guess he was talking about when they turn everything over to the OS otherwise I can't see why the drive rpm would matter. Anyway it made me chuckle as the Current LB + linux currently beats all of these hands down with slower hardware. On a different note... Since I had Linux listed as one of the OS's we want to support on our product he asked me some questions about how I was going to re-flash the BIOS under linux to update it every time the kernel version changed. At first I was really wondering what type of crack this guy was smoking but eventually it came out that he though we would be using a Boot Block flash which we aren't. According to him there is something in a boot block flash scheme that validates an area in the OS before it loads and you have to update it if the OS changes. Which he claims happens everytime you upgrade the kernel. What the hell???? If that were really the case then I would have thought I would have seen it discussed here already. Maybe it was and I missed it. Will one of you fine gentlemen who knows what he is talking about enlighten me? -- Richard A. Smith Bitworks, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] 501.846.5777 Sr. Design Engineer http://www.bitworks.com
