SCSI controllers generally provide their own BIOS. The BIOS would have to
provide direct drivers for on-board IDE, but not SCSI - it could just use INT
13h for that.
I'm not sure how on-board SCSI falls into this picture, though. Do such boards
have a separate SCSI BIOS, or it all built-in to the main one?
-- Getting carried away with the idea...With a decent BIOS implementation, we could take proper advantage of _all_ the chipset features, rather than just the ones the BIOS vendor used.
Recently, we've seen examples of features that have been unusable or at least difficult to use in Linux because the proprietary BIOS doesn't enable them or support them correctly. (UDMA, IO-APIC, ThinkPad APM...)
In addition to this improvement, we could offer extra functionality, like password-protection upon booting, an interface to a Linux device which allows you to edit BIOS settings (imagine an Xbios config program :). We could incorporate serial console support, MILO-style boot loading, and anything else you can fit into the space available. With hardware watchdogs, we could implement complete core dumps to the network on the way back up... Calls to re-implement ROM BASIC might be shot down in flames though.
There are already people offering BIOS upgrades that haven't been tailored to particular boards. Take a look at http://www.mrbios.com/
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.
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?
---- ---- ---- David Woodhouse, Robinson College, CB3 9AN, England. (+44) 0976 658355 Dave@imladris.demon.co.uk http://dwmw2.robinson.cam.ac.uk finger pgp@dwmw2.robinson.cam.ac.uk for PGP key.
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