> I want to build some custom hardware and run linux on it. I'm planning
> to go with something like a Mobile Pentium II processor and a southbridge
> chip. I don't care if this hardware is "PC compatible" or not, in fact,
> I don't want ti to be as its unnessary and adds costs to custom hardware.
Unless you need a lot of CPU power and have the experience and background
in laying out highspeed multilayer boards you might want to look at embedded
powerpc or arm designs.
> My question is, is it possible ot boot the linux kernal directly from
> ROM. IE: No BIOS, just a rom at mem location 0 that starts up lilo and
> loads the kernal into RAM. Has anyone done this or seen it?
Sure just write your own boot code to replace the bios
> Those doing embedded linux on non-intel platforms must do something like
> this as there isn't always a BIOS around.
>
> (And linux doesn't really use the bios at all, does it?)
It only needs the BIOS for boot up and for PCI. You can backport the direct
PCI from 2.1.x if you need it. You will need to write a PCI configuration
module to replace the PCI bios config.
Alan
