I used to run the sharewhere mrbios when I had a triton board.
Wow, what a difference from the crappy Award and AMI.
>> There are a limited number of chipsets on the market, and supporting just
>> Triton in its various guises will cover the vast majority of motherboards.
>> The basic functionality required from a BIOS implementation is clearly
>> documented in a number of places, and should be fairly easy to conform to.
I was just looking at the Intel data-sheets on the 440FX (PPro/PII) and the PCI Set.
Doesn't look like alot of things to fiddle with to just get the box running. Your power on
defaults get you pretty much all of the way there. As far as I can tell the BIOS does too
much in the areas of user interface, and not enough in the area of actual configurabity.
>> Providing a GPL'd BIOS implementation is a feasible project. It could be
>> extremely useful. It's not Linux, though - so could we discuss it elsewhere?
I think we may be able to go somewhere with this now. Before I was only thinking along the
lines of making a whole new BIOS from scratch. Now with the idea of a suite of little
real mode utils and something like grub or ELKS, it seems a lot more realistic.
Data sheets are easy to get a quite complete now....yeah we could do it.
I'm going to put up a mailing list today. (gnu-bios?) I'll post the kernel list when it's up.
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu