ron minnich rminnich@lanl.gov writes:
I don't expect the cards to come with fcode any time soon, if ever. Four reasons: first, the market is more or less zero, and the all the non-x86 systems support x86 emulators to support the x86 option roms;
For video. Does any one support anything else? RAID cards?
second, if they support two option roms (fcode, x86) that makes for lots more work; third, the PC market will probably never go to fcode; and fourth, I bet they (naively) think that fcode would make reverse engineering easier.
Yes, there are reasons it is unlikely to happen and those are reasons I really have not done much. Stefan believes in it so I think it makes a good test case of what we can support in LinuxBIOS. Mostly this is if I had to support the interface it would not suck to support :)
What I am actually thinking is the long term solution is to just use everyones driver disks (or the equivalent) for linux and if the BIOS does not contain the drivers you need it is just a rebuild of your boot loader away. Yes this means you have to boot your system once to load the driver for your new cool boot device but that should always be possible.
Eric