Hi Stefan,
On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 06:09:57PM +0200, Stefan Reinauer wrote:
Any "Normal BIOS" will copy an option rom in place before executing it. Most remove it afterwards.
This is surprising to me.
A typical VGA rom is going to hook int 0x10, a typical SCSI rom is going to hook int 0x13, and a typical PXE rom is going to hook int 0x19. None of these can then be removed.
I suppose there could be some cards that just use an option rom to init the hardware and are then eligible for removal. However, that seems like it would be a very expensive way to init hardware, and so I didn't think it would be common.
So when dealing with compatibility to them, we should aim to do things similarly
I completely agree.
Eric pointed out how an option rom can "resize" itself (and thus can also resize itself to zero). This does put a wrinkle in things - having coreboot deploy the roms and seabios run them may not be possible.
-Kevin