"Richard A. Smith" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > 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.
Drive spin up times should matter. We haven't done a lot of booting off of hard drives but we do know we can boot up faster than harddrives can spin up. I played with that a little the other day and I network booted before a drive had spun up. Ron when you wait for the harddrive to spin up what kind of boot times are you seeing? > 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? If he was thinking about linuxBIOS I can imagine how he would be confused. But for any other case it doesn't seem to make sense. But for with a normal bios I can't really imagine what he is talking about. Boot Block flash just has some special features to make it easier to serve as a BIOS ROM. But I haven't seen anything about image validation, nor could I imagine hardware doing it. Eric
