Hey guys,
Please bear with me, I have some questions that are probably pretty basic but I can't find the answers anywhere. My first question is what does the DiskOnChip provide to the LinuxBIOs project that the standard flash chip can't? My second is that I'm going to be using the VIA EPIA MII motherboard which has a PLCC BIOS, as far as I can tell PLCC DiskOnChips aren't very readily available. Should I use a DIP to PLCC adapter; how did the other people who used this board do it? My final question is how do I pick the size of the DiskOnChip. What is LinuxBIOS's typical size requirement; do motherboards have a maximum BIOS size limitation? If BIOSs do have a maximum size limitation how do I figure it out, VIA says says the BIOS for my board is 2/4Mbit flash memory. Sorry if these seem very basic.
Thanks, Michael Robinson mrobinson@fuzzymuzzle.com www.fuzzymuzzle.com
what does the DiskOnChip provide to the LinuxBIOs project that the standard flash chip can't?
More than 2 megabits of storage.
My second is that I'm going to be using the VIA EPIA MII motherboard which has a PLCC BIOS, as far as I can tell PLCC DiskOnChips aren't very readily available. Should I use a DIP to PLCC adapter; how did the other people who used this board do it?
The trend seems to be NOT to use DiskOnChip but rather a CF <> IDE adapter. Using FILO you can boot from the CF.
My final question is how do I pick the size of the DiskOnChip.
So if you're going to go for the CF <> IDE, then it just needs to be as big as your root partition (or even just an initrd). There are many other alternatives depending on network, disk, etc.
And if you've been following this list for a bit you'll know that you can't (yet) boot off of the CF adapter on the EPIA MII.
One last word of advice, get a bios savior.
Larry