Vijay Kumar Avadhanula <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Dear Mr. Biederman, > Thank you for your reply. Sorry to trouble you > again. I want to elaborate a little more on problem we > have on hand. We are designing a system based on a > proprietary 32-bit RISC processor of our own design. > The idea is to bring up a desktop system around this > processor. We plan to have all of-the-shelf components > for devices and peripherals, interfaced on PCI bus, > wherever possible. We are thinking of using SCSI > controller on PCI for hard disk, floppy and CDROM > sitting on SCSI. SVGA and Ethernet controllers are to > be on PCI. The idea is to port Linux OS on to this > system. We need some kind of BIOS support for > certain amount of device testing and initialisation > and boot strapping Linux. The problem is if this BIOS, > say LinuxBIOS, depends on on-chip BIOS ROM of the > devices, for example SVGA, we may not be able to run > it because probably that code is written for some > standard processor such as Intel x86, etc. On the > other hand, if we try to replace that code by some > thing developed by us for our processor, the internal > information of the devices is difficult to come, by > because device vendors may not part with those details > unless you are some kind of OEM. This is our problem! > We would be thankful to you if you could share your > experience in device(model, type and manufacturer) > selection and suggest some devices for which info is > available suiting our configuration. Hope you will be > able to spare time and effort. > Thank you - Vijay
LinuxBIOS does not currently execute any option ROMS, nor are there any current plans for it to. So this issue shows up on x86. There are only 2 kinds of x86 hardware this is a problem with. Hardware raid controllers, and video cards. For video cards the linux kernel framebuffer layer provides some support. This is an issue with every non-x86 linux port so the pool of people you have to help you is large. I personally have not done much research into which video cards are supported. As my target are cluster compute nodes that do not need video cards. Suggestions anyone? The other possibility for card support is to write a small open firmware layer to initialize your cards, and then essentially anything that will work on an apple or sparc will work. The OpenBIOS project is working on this and it seems to compliment LinuxBIOS, in this. An open firmware implementation can theoretically be loaded from the ROM as a bootloader under LinuxBIOS. Eric
