On Tue, Aug 28, 2001 at 03:01:34PM -0600, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> Ronald G Minnich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > we talked about that on the linuxbios list. That was a stupid publicity
> > stunt. .8 sec is actually pretty slow.
>
> Well I wouldn't call it slow. I'd say someone has achieved a
> reasonable BIOS boot time with a stock BIOS.
Well, only by compiling out some things that make it a stock BIOS.
After publicly flaming General Software on Slashdot, I had a brief email
conversation with a developer there (well, at least they read Slashdot;
it's a start) that included this bit, which strongly implies that their
0.8 second booting bios doesn't have all the bits you'd get in a "stock"
bios:
[me]
> > Obviously, for booting a Linux kernel, large parts of a 16-bit BIOS
> > are unneeded baggage.
[[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sure. No question. That's why the conditional assembly, and the many
> options you can enable and disable. It's also why we send source
> code, so that you can remove parts you don't think are necessary (or
> add parts that you believe are). We never could have made a .8 sec
> boot time with all of those extra parts enabled.
