steven james pyro@linuxlabs.com writes:
Greetings,
For many mainboards, 256K is the limit due to not having all of the pins connected. 512 is a harder limit imposed by the 32 available pins on the flash chip. DoC gets around that by having page flipping built in (sort of like EMM from back in the 8088 days).
Newer chipsets and motherboards get around the address line limit using either LPC interface (a serialization of ISA into a much smaller pin count), or firmware hub (more or less Intel's take on LPC).
Currently in the LPC/firmware hub form factor I have seen chips as large as 8mbit == 1MByte. And theoretical limit is something like 4GB. So as larger flash chips become available we can use them.
It is quite possible to get LinuxBIOS and a loader such as Etherboot into a conventional flash. From there the options for loading the kernel include network, IDE drive, or CF. A little work will allow floppy or CDROM.
Actually there is already a floppy driver in etherboot, though it could probably use some stabilizing. Only a CDROM drive requires some real work.
Eric