ron minnich rminnich@lanl.gov writes:
On Mon, 11 Aug 2003, ron minnich wrote:
For linuxbios to succeed in future, we'll need support for these two things. I think this is a lamentable state of affairs. But that's how it is.
I think long-term the best way to fix it for all architectures is via emulation, but for the immediate-term we can make callback/binary support for the common(-est) case: the x86.
I contradict myself. Either we need callbacks or we don't. If we get emulation, we don't need them. Sorry for my confusing note.
Eric, I am sympathy with what you are saying. There is a reality here -- people want VGA and they want it on early. I want to accomodate this.
Early is a problem unless we intimately know the video chipset. We can never accomodate early (as in all LinuxBIOS messages) with an option ROM.
For the option ROM solution the best we can do reliably is to run it right after we run the LinuxBIOS core.
Is emulation a suitable, architecture-independent way to achieve this? I'm thinking it might be. Can we then build it in as an option when we build a linuxbios?
Where to put this functionality, because we want it no matter which bootloader we use is a good question. My hunch is we make it some sort of header.
Because by early all we can really promise are the bootloader and the kernel messages, at least via this route.
Eric