Stefan Reinauer stepan@openbios.org writes:
- Douglas Frank frank@zk3.dec.com [050519 18:09]:
Man! You mean after ALL THESE YEARS, I finally thought of something useful? ...wait, I gotta put my teeth back in... there that's better.
OK, I'd like some help then, a mentor maybe, to direct my studies in getting up to speed. Feel free to reply off-list: what's the best way to start? If I need to read 3.8MB of source, which are the important parts?
I've added a new task to the openbios issue tracking system regarding this thing: https://www.openbios.org/roundup/openbios/task12
First you should get a test machine so you can flash LinuxBIOS+OpenBIOS and experiment with it..
Copying away memory is pretty close to the reset vector I guess. IIRC LinuxBIOS unconditionally initializes the ram controller after a reset, because it is so fast anyways..
And reinitializing the whole system makes for a very reliable reboot.
Maybe it shouldn't?
An interesting question is how much of this overlaps with kexec-on-panic. It could be that all we need to do is get the routing right nmi/panic button to the kernel's kexec-on-panic handler.
I meant to reply earlier but I lost track of this thread.
Eric