Question - why is everyone so hung up on getting everything inside the actual "BIOS" 
chip?

This clearly creates problems, especially when using motherboards based on "standard" 
PC requirements.

A simple PC BIOS Flash chip is now very cheap. Why not settle for a target of:-

1) Replacing BIOS with a LinuxBIOS in the smallest space possible, ie cheapest common 
flash chip.
2) Using Compact Flash (CF), or other similar technologies, placed on the IDE bus that 
mimics a standard disk drive.

As I understand it 1) is pretty much done. 2) May have been done but believe there is 
probably more support needed for trimming standard kernel + necessary driver/support 
modules to fit into smallest/cheapest CF devices.

Am I alone in this?

Regards,

Nick Jarmany

-----Original Message-----
From: Ian [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: 08 February 2002 02:15
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Questions


> The nice thing is that right now this is our big problem.  You have to climb
> an awfully long ways up hill to get this far.
> 
> And this is only a problem on machines designed for general purpose 
> uses. Embedded systems have larger ROM chips so can do more.

Yes, you guys have done an awesome job ... and is a privelege to be able
to argue about something as cool as this :-) [seriously!]


> I really want to find out what the rom situation is with AMD760 MPX
> chipset.  If I read it right this is the first non-intel system with
> LPC only support.   Which makes large roms much more practical.  But
> I still might be reading the situation wrong.
What's LPC?  A replacement for DIP32?  Actually, I was dumb-struck when
I discovered that my new ASUS board has no ISA slots :-(   All PCI ...




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