Ronald G Minnich rminnich@lanl.gov writes:
That's why they tell you to NEVER interrupt a BIOS update ... you can lose the MAC address. This amazingly fragile scheme is becoming more and more common.
Well that and you can kill your system 10 other ways as well. Killing a BIOS update is fragile. Though with a little care it can be made fairly robust.
It is becoming clear that we need a cmos.c for each mainboard, which does the mainboard-specific cmos functions. too bad.
A lot of this can be fairly motherboard independent with just the list of where it lives changing from board to board.
Something that came up while I was trying to figure out how to support multiple baud rates with the same binary build of LinuxBIOS, is the idea to have an area set aside in the rom image that is the size of the cmos, and has the default CMOS settings. And then anytime a checksum would fail or if we decide not to look at the CMOS at all, we consult this area. And it can use a common generic code base.
The we just need to set up the flash uptility to copy this into the image before it is flashed into the ROM. The nice thing is that we can uses this for things like motherboard serial numbers or the ipv6 DHCP DUID that they want for DHCP.
Eric