>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.
>
>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?
>
>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?)
No you don't *really* have to, Linux has it's own drivers for peripherals,
but booting up with the BIOS has some advantages. The chipsets that
are used these days need initialisation and the BIOS knows about them.
Anyway the BIOS only occupies the top 64kB of the bottom 1MB and once
the OS is running, all you lose is some memory space, and maybe not even
that since you couldn't really do anything with that 64kB anyway.
