Hello,
I'm a developer for an embedded computer manufacturer - RadiSys. I'm
looking for a quick way to get Linux running on our embedded x86 platforms.
Typically, we engineer the hardware platform to be "pc compatible" and
throw a BIOS onto the board to complete its PC-ness, however, some of our
platforms are not PCs even though they use PC chipsets (Intel BX's and.
Serverworks). In these instances diving into the BIOS source code to
port to a non-PC is not an effective option - the interdependencies of the
BIOS source code make this task essentially impossible. So, my question
is ... is the Linux BIOS well suited for these non-PC platforms?
Conceptually, my expectation is that the Linux BIOS would work fine on the
non-PC platforms and the level of port effort would be relative to how far
the design strayed from a PC. I would also expect that devices that could
not be found during the discovery and configuration phase would just be
left alone and un-initialized. Finally, since we're done once we get the
ROM'ed version of Linux running, there's no need to use LOBOS to load
another OS. Is my thinking correct? Do you foresee any problems with
making Linux BIOS work for embedded designs as described above?
Thanks in advance,
Rick Marion
(503) 615-1287
