Re: MILO vs BIOS on Linux/Intel.

Dave Cinege (dcinege@psychosis.com)
Wed, 11 Feb 98 20:18:19 -0500


On Wed, 11 Feb 1998 11:04:41 -0600 (CST), Patrick St. Jean wrote:

>On Wed, 11 Feb 1998, David Woodhouse wrote:
>> oleg@usm.uni-muenchen.de said:
>> > I'm wondering how difficult it would be to
>> > put MIniLOader in flash like it was done on Alpha instead
>> > of that LILO/MBR mess ?
>>
>> There's not going to be enough room in with the normal BIOS. However, if
>> you've got a network card with space for a ROM, you could put it in there.
>
>David,
> Are you sure about that? I was thinking about buying a spare prom for
>my board so that I could burn a new bios without trashing the existing
>one. When I was looking at the part number I recall it being a 1Mbit
>prom. That's 128k... That's a lot of room to put a loader for IDE hard

Got a rom image right here...yes indeed, 131,072 bytes.

>drives/cdroms and floppy disks... The only problem is that the BIOS does
>some initialization of the PCI stuff and more for SMP that'd beed to be
>put in. But that could probably be in the kernel anyways...

This is brings up a good point. Do we even need the BIOS and all it's stupity
in the first place? Couldn't something like GRUB with real mode config
programs replace it entirly?
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