Re: Flash linux into PC bios?
Joshua E. Rodd (jerodd@noah.dhs.org)
Wed, 21 Apr 1999 20:04:07 -0400
Peter Horton wrote:
[Linux or something like it in the system's BIOS]
> This is unlikely to be a usable solution. The problem is the crisis
> recovery mode of the BIOS is required only to run a very basic DOS setup
> and a re-Flashing program. This means there is no requirement for all the
> memory to be setup (or to be setup for best performance), for the caches
> to be turned on, or for the CPU to be run at it's normal speed. If you
> have a PCI/AGP video card, it may not even be initialised. The boot block
> might only be 8/16K in size, and this means the boot block BIOS is cut
> down to the very bare essentials to do crisis recovery.
> Shame though as this would otherwise be quite cool ...
On the GNU tasklist there is a project (not to imply that any actual
work has been done) to build a freed-software BIOS. It would be interesting,
although the current chipset support neccessary in (for example) the IDE
device dirver look like potato chips compared to actually initialising the
disk controller chipsets, the display adapter chipset, the cache controller,
etc.
There really isn't much advantage to placing vmlinux into a flash ROM module,
either.
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