On Mon, 23 Feb 1998, Pavel Machek wrote:
The purpose of a BIOS is to create independence between hardware and operating system.
Used to be... :-(.
At least linux uses almost nothing off bios due to performance it costs.
The performance hit is in two places. Currently you have to switch to real-mode, which I would propose we would fix. Secondly, if the BIOS isn't shawdowed you are using much slower accesses.
Assuming no unnecessary delays, system startup time is dominated by hard disk spinup time, and cannot be reduced any further.
You do not need to spin up harddrives during bootup. At least not *all* hardrives.
Interesting point... At the least, you don't really have to wait for them to be done until you actually go to load code off of them. Sure would speed up my boottime, since the SCSI drives take a while to get going.
AmiWinbios is trash, and I'm stuck with it. It costed me about 2 days to make it work with big disk. You ask why? Well, to turn ON LBA in amiwinbios, you have to set 'Hard disc LBA setting' to OFF. Yes, it is their bug.
Ouch! My BIOS doesn't boot SCSI, which is rather annoying.
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