Doesn't that make three components to take care of : the flash chip for booting, the CF for the Linux kernel and the IDE device (say) for doing whatever you want to do. If such it sounds like increased headache. But , say, if you took the pain to develop the relevant drivers, wouldn't it be more effective to get them right into core LinuxBIOS, keeping size boundaries in mind, of course.
Elias.
-----Original Message-----
From: Nick Jarmany [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Monday, February 11, 2002 1:03 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: RE: Questions
Question - why is everyone so hung up on getting everything inside the actual "BIOS" chip?
This clearly creates problems, especially when using motherboards based on "standard" PC requirements.
A simple PC BIOS Flash chip is now very cheap. Why not settle for a target of:-
1) Replacing BIOS with a LinuxBIOS in the smallest space possible, ie cheapest common flash chip.
2) Using Compact Flash (CF), or other similar technologies, placed on the IDE bus that mimics a standard disk drive.
As I understand it 1) is pretty much done. 2) May have been done but believe there is probably more support needed for trimming standard kernel + necessary driver/support modules to fit into smallest/cheapest CF devices.
Am I alone in this?
Regards,
Nick Jarmany
-----Original Message-----
From: Ian [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: 08 February 2002 02:15
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Questions
> The nice thing is that right now this is our big problem. You have to climb
> an awfully long ways up hill to get this far.
>
> And this is only a problem on machines designed for general purpose
> uses. Embedded systems have larger ROM chips so can do more.
Yes, you guys have done an awesome job ... and is a privelege to be able
to argue about something as cool as this :-) [seriously!]
> I really want to find out what the rom situation is with AMD760 MPX
> chipset. If I read it right this is the first non-intel system with
> LPC only support. Which makes large roms much more practical. But
> I still might be reading the situation wrong.
What's LPC? A replacement for DIP32? Actually, I was dumb-struck when
I discovered that my new ASUS board has no ISA slots :-( All PCI ...
