On 5/5/05, James <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Norbert Kamenicky <noro <at> xmedia.sk> writes: > > > The purpose of BIOS is not to provide complete and excellent HW > > maintenance in multitasking environment, but system boot up only. > > Maybe there are some exceptions, but generaly if kernel is alive, > > u can safely remove all BIOS chips from it's sockets. > > For most of the legacy hardware: drives, floppy, CD, mouse, serial ports > this may be true. But, let's think about ACPI, I2C, sensors, SMBus, > Dallas one-wire, and the myriad of undocumented hardware/comm channels > going on the motherboard. Not to mention that the evil one from redmond > has convinced quite a few hardware vendors to pursue nefarious > activities during the boot process..... > > Have you actually removed a bios/flash chip or erased it after boot > to test your theory? I think what you have said is true of older boards > and some current vendors, but, certainly not is all cases.... > > Let's think about this a little bit more.... >
Thanks for the answers so far. My main interest in this area is one that most here won't probably have much experience on - Gentoo-xbox. In the case of Gentoo proper running on the XBox there is a large amount of confusion and differing opinions about BIOS. Clearly you have to make a change to get Gentoo to even load on the XBox because the M$ BIOS doesn't boot from a DVD. However what the BIOS does in that architecture after boot seems unclear to me from the small amount of reading I've done so far. For the XBox there is the Cromwell BIOS but there are also other BIOS's done by groups outside of Linux development. (As best I understand them.) Certainly most are to allow more sorts of game playing and hacks, which is of no interest to me, but some of them allow booting from a DVD, hence my interest in whether to use one fo them or wait for a version of Cromwell for my XBox. (Since it isn't out yet.) While the XBox and a normal PC aren't identical by any means it seems to me that the Linux kernel running on either of these platforms is, more or less, the same and would likely make the same sort of requests to BIOS if it had any interest in doing so. If the 2.6.XX kernel on an X86 PC doesn't talk to BIOS it seems a reasonable change that the same kernel on an XBox won't either, but that's a guess. Anyway, I'm certainly interested in more comments. I hope that clarifies why I'm asking. Thanks, Mark -- [email protected] mailing list
