SCSI card option rom may do several thing: 1. download FW from other address in the Option rom or BIOS into SCSI Controller, then start the controller. 2. Booting OS from SCSI disk.
Some SCSI addon card has another EEPROM for FW, and the controller will work after power is on.
For onboard SCSI, may spare that EEPROM and need option rom to download fw into it.
The other thing for Option ROM is providing booting from SCSI disk or CDROM.
If the System is boot from Network or other media, You may don't need this booting feature.
Actually the FW download and controller starting can be done by Linux kernel driver.
YH.
-----邮件原件----- 发件人: ron minnich [mailto:rminnich@lanl.gov] 发送时间: 2004年2月4日 15:39 收件人: Eric W. Biederman 抄送: Stefan Reinauer; Tarl Neustaedter; LinuxBIOS 主题: Re: OpenFirmware and interrupt-map
On 4 Feb 2004, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
Interesting. I do know that the RAID/SCSI x86 option roms in general were not needed on the Alpha. Do you know of any RAID/SCSI cards that actually need their option ROM to be run?
Every one I have research it is a non issue.
I forget which card it was, but we did have a problem here at one point with a card that really needed that scsi bios to be run. We junked the card.
ron
_______________________________________________ Linuxbios mailing list Linuxbios@clustermatic.org http://www.clustermatic.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxbios