On Wed, Dec 13, 2000 at 08:34:52PM -0700, Ronald G Minnich wrote:
> On Wed, 13 Dec 2000, Levi Khatskevitch wrote:
>
> > > The idea is: have linuxbios copied to ram before the kernel is started,
> > > then teach the linux kernel to recognize linuxbios as though it were a
> > > sort of kernel-module, and make the linuxbios namespace and functions
> > > available from within the kernel.
>
> I've been looking at the acpi support in 2.4. I no longer see a need for
> this. Plus, I keep going back to the main idea: linuxbios should not do
> much. Linux should. Otherwise we're going to end up duplicating linux
> capabilities, badly.
I don't know a thing about ACPI, so I guess I can't comment intelligently
on that.
But there are things that the linux kernel does badly, and among those
things are areas where board-specific knowledge is needed, making simple
tasks complicated. For embedded systems it's easy to end up in a
situation where the kernel has to get patched left and right to accomodate
unique hardware, and in this case it's much easier to modify linuxbios to
accomodate the hardware, rather than let linux try to duplicate BIOS
functionality, badly. :)
I guess I can understand how you cluster guys can see it differently:
you're using commodity hardware that's well supported directly by the
kernel. When you have embedded hardware that's subtly different from
everybody else's hardware it's a lot simpler to keep your hardware-
specific code in one place.
For me, linuxbios does two things: board-specific hardware config and
generic kernel-booting. If linuxbios has to learn how to configure a
piece of hardware (let's say chipset setup) it seems like a waste of
energy to teach the linux kernel how to do the same thing (especially
because the linux kernel would need to know how to do it for many
different boards, while linuxbios is built for one particular board).
Before anybody really freaks out, I'm not seriously suggesting linuxbios
be changed in any way. But I don't think that kernel->bios calls are
always an absolutely _horrible_ idea, and shouldn't be rejected simply
because linux doesn't do it that way today. Linux hates the bios because
the bios is 16-bit, and proprietary, and often broken. A 32-bit, open,
working bios is much friendlier.
And since kernel modules are an example of how to do this without freezing
the interface forever (such as 16-bit bios calls are), it seemed like an
interesting idea.
But since I don't know the first thing about dynamic linking, and
everybody else seems pretty horrified at the idea, rest easy it ain't
gonna happen :)
Eric
