At Linux Expo, I heard about some Alpha machines which were going to
have the Linux kernel in firmware, as they have 2MB of firmware to play
with.
That is a very interesting idea, and was parallel to some of the things
I've looked into, like OpenBIOS. For example, to boot from the "bare
metal" instead of BIOS on my K6, I'll need to initialize the DRAMs,
northbridge, and southbridge. That sort of stuff is obvious.
I am interested in finding out -- what BIOS dependencies are lurking in
a standard x86 kernel? How much arch/i386/* code requires BIOS
presence?
APM, and several framebuffer drivers (which directly or indirectly rely
on BIOS) wouldn't work. Hard disk geometry reading might fail, I am
guessing.
Ideally I would like to be able to flash a kernel[1], either a
mini-kernel as a boot loader a la MILO-in-firmware, or a full kernel
ready and waiting to boot my userland. If the mini-kernel-in-firmware
approach is used, Tigran's BCP would come in handy.
Regards,
Jeff
[1] larger flash chips are on the shopping list, if you have a standard
PC... :)
-- Jeff Garzik | "Vegetarian" is the Indian word Building 1024 | for 'lousy hunter.' MandrakeSoft, Inc. |- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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