Dear LinuxBIOS experts,
I note the comment on the web site saying that most motherboards have only a 512 kbyte flash chip, which isn't enough for a compressed kernel, and so LinuxBIOS is normally used with a bootloader like FILO to load a kernel from an IDE device or whatever.
But larger flash chips are available. For example, my VIA board has a 512k SST chip for which pin-compatible 1M and 2M parts are available (but apparently no larger than that). So my first question is, will higher-capacity flash chips "just work", or does the motherboard design limit them to the flash size that they are supplied with? If it is possible to fit a larger chip the next question is whether these are easy to obtain in small (e.g. one-off) quantities.
Assuming that this is possible, let's say that I build a kernel containing only minimal drivers for the framebuffer and ethernet - no IDE etc, and maybe use the "Linux-Tiny" patch. I wonder how much space would then be left for an initrd. Ideally I would like to fit a single executable of maybe a few hundred kbytes uncompressed which is run instead of init (this is a for fixed-purpose box).
This is a very appealing way to use cheap PC hardware in fixed-purpose applications, if it can be done. Maybe other readers are already doing this sort of thing?
Many thanks for any advice, or pointers to existing docs.
Cheers,
Phil.