OpenBIOS

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4297 discussions

Re: OpenBIOS news.
by daniel.engstrom＠riksnett.no 21 Nov '98

21 Nov '98

On 21 Nov, Stefan Reinauer wrote: > Hi Daniel, > > first, I think, we should discuss this on the list. I'd like to forward > the postings if you haven't anything against this (without the binaries, > they will go to the webserver... Ok, openbios CC:ed >> > Ok. that's pretty good. Did you use the version including my try to >> > include the menuconfig stuff? >> No, I though about it but I decided that having one CONFIG_ variable >> per chip set is wrong, it should be one variable which have the chip >> set name as a value (have more than one chip set configured make no >> sense). > I don't see this. I've looked at the pci chipset stuff and it's really > possible to access and probe the pci bus on newer boards without even > havinng setup the memory controller. Yep, but have you tried to program without working RAM? No stack, only 8 registers to keep stuff in? - Believe me the first thing you wanna do is get at least the first 1MB of RAM working... > I've talked with this about many people and having support for more than > one intel chipset in one, for example, would be a knockout fact for award > bios in large compuyter pools. And there are MB specific issues such as how the SIMM/DIMM sockets are wired, how the AUX chip-select signals found on most super I/O and South Bridges are used, how the super I/O is implemented, which way to ROM is mapped after reset (do we look at the top 64k or the bottom in a 128k ROM). So I'll tell you - a BIOS image is not only chip set specific, but it is mother board specific. It might be possible to make a BIOS which works for several configurations, but that will not be as simple as putting support for several SCSI HA's or NIC's in a Unix/Linux kernel. /Daniel --

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Re: OpenBIOS news.
by Stefan Reinauer 21 Nov '98

21 Nov '98

Hi... > Ok, so I included another project I used to work on a year ago. It aimed > towards loading a linux kernel from a ISA board iwht loats of flash. I > never got it working though (kernel hangs during uncompress) but some of > the folks that are requesting kernel-in-rom features might find fixing > this a faster path than waiting for our project... > It was written for a now-discontinued Ampro board, but Sealevel > (http://www.sealevel.com) and Advantech (http://www.adavantech-usa.com) > have similar products available, porting should be trivial. > > /Daniel So.. there are two new files in http://www.freiburg.linux.de/OpenBIOS/bin/ Look at it and continue hacking... I'd say that we should include the menuconfig stuff as fast as possible, no matter whether we allow multiple chipsets or not.... It's no problem to have either method in the .config file Stefan. -- Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation ... the other eight are unimportant. -- Henry Miller

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Re: OpenBIOS news.
by daniel.engstrom＠riksnett.no 21 Nov '98

21 Nov '98

On 20 Nov, Stefan Reinauer wrote: > > 1) Licence > Is anything speaking against using GPL as licence for OpenBIOS? I am > not really into that licencing stuff. Would it be better to use some > kind of BSD licence or even the Netscape NPL? I want to make sure that > this project will remain free forever and people can use it for free, > no matter whether it is commercial use or not. And, of course, I think > it would be best, if changes made by foreign contributors are included into > the official project. I thought a bit about that too. I think it should be GPL, no sane person should consider the chip set registers or motherboard interconnect trade secrets. And why use another license if you have no secrets? > 3) Supported hardware > Many people told me that they would like to see support for recent PCI > hardware only. I think this makes sense, because it's easy to autoprobe > chipset type and SuperIO type on the PCI bus. This allows us to have > one generic firmware image that can be flashed to a couple of different > machines that have different motherboards. This is especially nice for > people with large computer pools (like admins of universitiy pools) I'd say it is hard to probe the PCI bus before you're up and running (DRAM working at least) and to come up and run you need to know which chip set you're on... Besides in addition to what chip set and which super I/O chip that is attached you might need to know hove some things are wired on the mother board. > 4) There have been many new wishes on the wishlist today, please check > them out at > http://www.freiburg.linux.de/OpenBIOS/wishlist/ > and *DO* comment on them. I have my own agenda quite clear... First get the thing runnig on one or two chip sets, do FD and IDE read-only drivers, implement something like syslinux that can boot a hacked Linux kernel in PM from disk. After that we can start to take requests... :) > 6) I thought about writing email to some chipset manufacturers to ask > whether they want to participate in our project by writing free code > for their hardware. Does anyone have an idea what to write? Opti, SiS and Intel at least have docs available on the web, Ali doesn't even have an email address to mail to on their web site... (Anyone who knows an Ali sales rep?) /Daniel --

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openbios.org
by Stefan Reinauer 21 Nov '98

21 Nov '98

Dear OpenBIOS readers, well, I tried to register the domain openbios.org two days ago and I noticed that this domain is already registered to someone else. As there's no contact email neither on www.openbios.org nor on www.openbios.com, I registered using the registration form on the openbios.org webpage. It seems to me that the "other" openbios project, which is registered since august 1998, is semi-commercial. Does anyone know anything about it? I will try to email the postmaster(a)openbios.org now to find out more about the other project. Just my 2 cents.. Stefan.

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Some Ideas
by Wim Crols 21 Nov '98

21 Nov '98

Hi, I recently found out about this project OpenBIOS. I was also thinking of making a better BIOS for quite some time. But haven't started yet to code anything or look for documentation. But I did think about how such a state of the art BIOS should work. Here are my ideas (any comments are welcome): - Everything which is on the motherboard and needs to set up at boat-time has to be done by the bios. - the bios also has 'drivers' for on board chips (like serial, parallel, perhaps sound and video if they are on the motherboard). - bios on the motherboard should not have drivers for extension-cards (like SCSI, video, sound, network, ...) So don't put every possible driver in the bios because it would grow to big on the long term. - bios should detect such extension cards and load the bioses on those cards (as long as it's not possible to alter bios's on extension cards the OS-kernel should load drivers for it). - bios also needs an OS-Loader so you can choose at boot time which OS you want to boot. - there should be a good API which makes it possible fo an OS to use the bios 'drivers' (whatever system or OS you have) instead of having drivers for every possible extension card. (Which means a generic SCSI-API, generic NIC-API, generic Sound-API, generic Video-API, ...) If this API is well-designed it should be possible to write kernels without one line of assembler code in it (so it would be easy to port to another architecture with a bios with the same API). This is basically what's in my mind. Please do comment about it. Wim -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Wim Crols wim(a)designisdead.com Design is Dead http://www.designisdead.com tel.: +32 3 231 48 56 fax: +32 3 231 44 83 ======================================================================

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Logo
by Daniele 'Realcosmo' Frijia 20 Nov '98

20 Nov '98

hiho... stefan and me had the idea, to make a logo contest... i think it's necessary to make a logo, that says "ahh...i know this logo..it's that from OpenBIOS !" ;-) suggestions, comments ? greetings... Daniele .oO http://realcosmo.hat.gelitten.org realcosmo(a)hat.gelitten.bei.infra.de Oo.

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Re: OpenBIOS news.
by Andrew Kohlsmith 20 Nov '98

20 Nov '98

I had lost this mailing list for a few months this summer and when I finally do find it I find that there is something tangible to play with. Most excellent. :-) > Daniel Engstroem told, that he would prefer "Generic Firmware" as name > for this project. This is sure a philosophical question, but I'd like > to see the word "Open" in our project name. As OpenFirmware is already > taken by the IEEE standard, I decided to use OpenBIOS. On the other > hand, what we want to do is not to write just another BIOS like MR > BIOS, Award BIOS, Ami BIOS, Phoenix BIOS, ... but something completely > new with the approach of being modern. Personally I love the name OpenBIOS. It kind of goes well with the F-CPU. Just because it has the acronym "BIOS" in it doesn't mean it can't be something better than anything else with the same acronym. > 6) I thought about writing email to some chipset manufacturers to ask > whether they want to participate in our project by writing free code > for their hardware. Does anyone have an idea what to write? I would guess that the best method to target the chipset manufacturers would be to indicate that by releasing the specifcations to their chipsets they are making it available to MANY more people than they would via an NDA or similarly closed agreement policy. Look at Apple/IBM... As far as having the chipset manufacturers write code... I doubt they'd be interested... that is what the databooks are for, for someone *else* to use *their* hardware. :-) As far as licensing goes, I agree that it should be licensed such that it remains free and in the public domain no matter what gets done with it. I too am lacking in the license knowledge department, however. Andrew

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OpenBIOS news.
by Stefan Reinauer 20 Nov '98

20 Nov '98

Dear OpenBIOS readers, at first I have to tell you that I am totally overwhelmed by the subscriptions in the last three days. Our project has been announced on http://slashdot.org/ and will be announced on http://news.freshmeat.net/ this evening or tomorrow. Well, I saw some wishes on the wishlist, that I think are necessary to discuss here. 1) Licence Is anything speaking against using GPL as licence for OpenBIOS? I am not really into that licencing stuff. Would it be better to use some kind of BSD licence or even the Netscape NPL? I want to make sure that this project will remain free forever and people can use it for free, no matter whether it is commercial use or not. And, of course, I think it would be best, if changes made by foreign contributors are included into the official project. 2) Name Daniel Engstroem told, that he would prefer "Generic Firmware" as name for this project. This is sure a philosophical question, but I'd like to see the word "Open" in our project name. As OpenFirmware is already taken by the IEEE standard, I decided to use OpenBIOS. On the other hand, what we want to do is not to write just another BIOS like MR BIOS, Award BIOS, Ami BIOS, Phoenix BIOS, ... but something completely new with the approach of being modern. 3) Supported hardware Many people told me that they would like to see support for recent PCI hardware only. I think this makes sense, because it's easy to autoprobe chipset type and SuperIO type on the PCI bus. This allows us to have one generic firmware image that can be flashed to a couple of different machines that have different motherboards. This is especially nice for people with large computer pools (like admins of universitiy pools) Please note: I don't want to keep anyone from writing support for his very own hardware, but the main goal must be to support current stuff. This is IMHO the only way to reach a wide usage of OpenBIOS/GFW 4) There have been many new wishes on the wishlist today, please check them out at http://www.freiburg.linux.de/OpenBIOS/wishlist/ and *DO* comment on them. 5) I noticed that the wishlist is still a bit buggy, especially with handling the dates of entries. I hope I get the time to fix that very soon. 6) I thought about writing email to some chipset manufacturers to ask whether they want to participate in our project by writing free code for their hardware. Does anyone have an idea what to write? So, happy hacking, guys :-) Stefan.

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OpenBIOS wishlist
by Stefan Reinauer 16 Nov '98

16 Nov '98

Hi... I've written a little script to maintain a wishlist for openbios/gfw. This is easier than editing the homepage every time there's a new idea. You can have a look at it or add own entries on http://www.freiburg.linux.de/OpenBIOS/wishlist/ Best regards, Stefan -- Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation ... the other eight are unimportant. -- Henry Miller

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Re: OpenBIOS has first Code :-) (fwd)
by Ragnar Hojland Espinosa 14 Nov '98

14 Nov '98

Since it looks it didn't make it here: (or at least I didn't get it) On Sat, 14 Nov 1998, Stefan Reinauer wrote: > Dear Linux-Kernel readers, > > This may be somewhat offtopic for most of you, but as I guess it's interesting > for many others, I decided to send this mail to linux-kernel. It's about the > OpenBIOS project. Our goal is to write a free, completely configurable firmware > that is availbale under GNU PL. > > I had the time to have a closer look at Daniel Engstroems code now and I > think we should use this as a code base for further developments. > I've played around a bit with the Makefiles and you can now configure the > firmware setup by using make menuconfig or make config, like in the linux > kernel. make xconfig doesn't work correctly right now, because I had to > add some changes to the whole bunch of Linux configuration scripts to > allow a more general usage. > > Get OpenBIOS 0.0.1 (completely based on Daniel's gfw-0.1) from > http://www.freiburg.linux.de/OpenBIOS/ > > We only have support for 3 chipsets right now, which is definitely not > enough. I will try to write support for the Intel 430HX/TX/VX/.. chipsets, > as I have an old HX board at home. If anyone is capable of doing this > (it's not really hard, as you just need the datasheets for your chipset > and a board containing the chipset itself to test) > > Now, at the moment, we don't have hardware drivers for any bootdevices. > Should we go the way linux goes and write our own drivers or should we try > to use other bioses (i.e. scsi bios on host adapter) for that? > > The second thing may be simpler and shorter, but I guess the first one is > the way to go because we need drivers for floppies, parport devices etc, > too.. :) > > Well.. I wrote this just to start discussion again :-) > > Best regards, > Stefan. > > -- > Reincarnation: Life sucks, then you die. Then life sucks again. -- ____/| Ragnar Hojland (ragnar(a)lightside.ddns.org) Fingerprint 94C4B \ o.O| _______________________________________________ 2F0D27DE025BE2302C =(_)= | 7 Diciembre, manifestacion contra Telefonica! | 104B78C56 B72F0822 U | No faltes!! http://www.internautas.org/7D/) | hkp://keys.pgp.com ----------------------------------------------- --- OpenBIOS -- http://www.linkscape.net/openbios/ openbios-request(a)psychosis.com Body: un/subscribe Problems? dcinege(a)psychosis.com

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