I have been lurking on this list for a while. I haven't actually ever used the code, but I signed onto the mailing list because this sounded like such a neat project.
>From what I understand, the project was originally expecting most motherboards by now to come with at least 512k flash roms. That still isn't happening yet so an effort was made to squeeze the linux kernel into 256k. The message in the link below describes what looks to me like the most successful effort, but even it wasn't enough. http://www-missl.cs.umd.edu/linuxbios/msg01886.html So the linuxbios project is now no longer attempting to replace the bios with linux, but instead with some code that does the minimum amount of initialization necessary and then loads linux (or another OS) as an elf image or over the network using something like etherboot. Every once in a while when a nasty hardware issue arises, people like Ron say that this is an example of why they wanted linux in the bios in the first place...so the large kernel community can support all of the wacky hardware. First of all, please correct me if what I said above is incorrect. My questions are: Have people given up on getting the 2.4.x kernel down to below 192k? What kernel configurations, compile options (like -Os), and methods (such as UPX compression) have been tried? Is their a comprehensive docuent describing the approaches that were tried? Does it look like flash roms will get bigger anytime soon? Is a tiny, modern linux kernel something that is worth pursuing? Thank you for your time, Andrew Shewmaker
