Lloyd wrote:
I do realize that there are standards out there, and the IEEE web page address's these. I also realize that as a bona fide lurker, and a preferred hardware puke, I don't know everything there is to know about software system design or high performance systems. However, after over ten years of hardware / firmware development on small computer systems, I have learned that the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) approach saves an infinite amount of time.
And I totally agree
Well, I'm also basically a lurker ... all I ever really wanted to get involved in would be an Open Source Modular BIOS for PC- compatibles so everyone could assemble the modules needed for the chips used on the mobo and 'update' the BIOS for all the old boxes mobo's out there that don't get any support from the factory any more (update as in BIOS Y2K bugs, support booting from CD etc etc also for oldish 486 and P5 style boxes serving as, well server of some sort).
Looking around the web I ran into this OpenBIOS thingy, was delighted at first and then started reading about all the OpemFirmware requirements FCode etc etc and got a glorious headache -- Certainly _NOT_ KISS ... I just want to do some chipset/mobo hacking to get something everyone can use for free running on as many systems as possible - we have free OSes for each and every machine but for the BIOS everything we can and can't do with our machines is still decided by a handfull of small companies charging money and not offering what we want.
The 'desire' to boot into a GUI at BIOS level seems cool but _does_ make things a whole lot more complicated (also not KISS) - I'd see it as an add-on on top of working beep-IO/serial-IO/text-IO init routines. When you start all that fancy talk about not wanting _any_ textual 'spam' from graphics card, SCSI adapter, MFM/RLL/IDE/EIDE HDD-adapter or whatever (aparently for some out there without a basic grasp of the well documented expansion ROM init sequences) you are really loosing me. What's so bad about the machine telling me one or two things about itself while booting (great help for troubleshooting a friend's PC that you don't know nothing about). The effort to try and get rid of these messages just isn't worth it .... and you very, very probably really don't want to mess with doing your own init of all Graphics / SCSI whatever other adapter card as 80% of the time you just won't get it done with simple chipset-used-on-the-adapter-datasheets.
Having said that ... if all you want (for starters) is that the spam don't apear ... that's easy for _anything_ that comes after the VGA- init ... just take over / monitor all INT 10 funtionallity and don't output anything requested from subsequent expansion ROM init's (so don't mess with the actual init just 'handle' the display IO for them either by sending it to NULL or by doing it through you BIOS- level GUI) - it's very unlikely the expansion ROM init routines of anything other than a display adapter itself would bypass INT10.
Even for the VGA-init there must be some dirty no-spam-hack possible without doing the graphics adapter init yourself - maybe hooking the timer interrupt and checking for changes in the INT10 vectors or other display related BIOS-data to monitor progress of the VGA-Init and then blank the screen ASAP (you may get a short spam-flash) or maybe even set the debug flag, single step through the VGA-init and then monitor any direct memory IO in the display adapter memory range as well as INT10 (as some adapters first neatly set up INT 10 and then use it themselfes to display their spam.... just some thougths ... but as I said _I_ don't think it's worth the effort - just let the spam roll by and then do your GUI thing (or not rather??)
Okay, now flame me for not playing along ;-) Arp arpy@wish.net - To unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@freiburg.linux.de with 'unsubscribe openbios' in the body of the message