M Carling wrote:
Welcome!
I'm the FAQ maintainer, so I'll try to answer your questions.
OpenBIOS is envisioned to serve the needs of MB manufacturers, hobbyists, and embedded systems developers.
Great... :)
There is no list archive yet, AFAIK. This is something we need to do.
O.K., I'll keep every message on my computer, it seems from the low traffic that my 10GB disk won't be filled right away ;) and I'll try to setup a digest and an archive. BTW. feel free to forward me any relevant old message.
The guidelines are still flexible. About the only thing on which there seems to be a clear consensus (that had been controversial) is that OpenBIOS should support (as a compile time option) multiple chipsets in a single executable. This would enable MB manufacturers to compile one BIOS image for all their products.
And now the BIGGEST question: what will that BIOS be, a resource configurator and OS loader and nothing after boot, or it will offer some services to be used after boot, if so what services and how? I think that is the fundamental part of the design guidelines. Related: are those guidelines somewere in a written format, is about the IEEE 1275 ummm.... thing ?????? As for multi-chipset, multi-processor support I think is a good thing and Award's approach with a BIOS boot block who probe and then decompress and load in the shadow memory the relevant module archives stored in ROM is the best, of course YMHO. But somehow I don't thing that the resultant image will be small enogh to be hold in a 128KB Flash like now, I belive this mostly irellevant for Main Boards manufacturers but a BIG deal for embedded systems, of course somebody could want to compile in only the necessary modules.
There is no subproject leader for embedded systems, at this time.
Then to put in another way, is anybody on this list doing embedded BIOS/systems now ??? Please answer here or e-mail me so we can figure out somethig because unfortunately in a embedded system we have a totally different thingie like no "simple" OS loader, maybe even no OS at all, but just a highly optimised API framework and yes I know that somewere is a grossly over-priced Embedded DOS but I don't thing this is a solution. Sugestions and comment wellcome :).
The leader is Stefan Reinauer stepan@linux.de
I don't have any docs on the boards you asked about.
All right, I'll cry just once more: :)
PLEAZZ, pleazz, if some one has access at ALI chips ( mostly ALI 6117C and super I/O) detailed documentation get in touch with me, is important for me and maybe for the Open Source movement.
Cheers, M
All the best, Mircea C.