Hi,
I had the idea of using LinuxBIOS but also maintaining a legacy BIOS for debugging and dual boot scenarios. It would be linked into the LinuxBIOS image and jumped to alternatively depending on the user input. However, thinking about this gave me 2 questions:
1. Are there any forms of user input possible into LinuxBIOS loader? Is the system initialized enough to accept a keyboard input, or ACPI system button, or even something sillier like checking if a PS/2 mouse is plugged in (the user can unplug the mouse to signal LinuxBIOS to jump to the legacy BIOS instead).
2. Is it possible to get the machine into a state where it can check whatever form of user input is possible, but still be able to then put the machine back into a state where the legacy BIOS won't be confused.
Or could something like this be done via the reboot vector instead? Power on clean gets you LinuxBIOS, but reboot goes to legacy BIOS... I guess the problem there again would be putting the hardware back into a state that the legacy BIOS can use.
any ideas on that topic? It would be nice to use FreeDOS occasionally for testing some external hardware control programs, but FreeDOS requires a PC BIOS, of which there are no open source implementations that I know of. :( Maybe that can be a project for the future, but somehow I see a lack of interest in putting any new effort into a dead platform, so using the legacy proprietary BIOS might be the only real world choice.
p.s. there is a broken Microsoft link in the FAQ, it is here now: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/hwdev/archive/BUSBIOS/pciirq.mspx
On Mon, 8 Dec 2003, Ryan Underwood wrote:
any ideas on that topic? It would be nice to use FreeDOS occasionally for testing some external hardware control programs, but FreeDOS requires a PC BIOS, of which there are no open source implementations that I know of. :( Maybe that can be a project for the future, but somehow I see a lack of interest in putting any new effort into a dead platform, so using the legacy proprietary BIOS might be the only real world choice.
oh sure there is. see "SEBOS" project in linuxbios v1 cvs tree. It boots windows, and windows 98 wasn't that far off.
hi,
On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 09:06:33AM -0500, Adam Sulmicki wrote:
On Mon, 8 Dec 2003, Ryan Underwood wrote:
any ideas on that topic? It would be nice to use FreeDOS occasionally for testing some external hardware control programs, but FreeDOS requires a PC BIOS, of which there are no open source implementations that I know of. :( Maybe that can be a project for the future, but somehow I see a lack of interest in putting any new effort into a dead platform, so using the legacy proprietary BIOS might be the only real world choice.
oh sure there is. see "SEBOS" project in linuxbios v1 cvs tree. It boots windows, and windows 98 wasn't that far off.
Very nice! That slipped in under my radar. I guess I'll be heading in that direction then instead of bothering with the old proprietary junk.
thanks
On Mon, 2003-12-08 at 14:36, Ryan Underwood wrote:
Very nice! That slipped in under my radar. I guess I'll be heading in that direction then instead of bothering with the old proprietary junk.
You should also note Peter Anvin's MEMDISK which emulates a virtual HDD from a memory image. The code lives with syslinux, but not tied to any specific bootloader.
http://syslinux.zytor.com/memdisk.php
It's possible that there may soon also be PXE for Etherboot as well; there is a reasonable amount of code in existance and I'm trying to resurrect it and get enough working that a couple of NBPs will run.
I personally think that a completely open legacy BIOS implementation based on these + ADLO + bochs BIOS with hardware handled by LinuxBIOS will have a very significant impact on a certain family of proprietary operating systems.
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Adam Sulmicki -
Peter Lister -
Ryan Underwood