New Code :-)

[Stefan Reinauer]

Dear OpenBIOS readers,

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. (Daniel,
I hope, you allow this :>)
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)

I thought about building something like an eprom simulator which can be
plugged into the bios socket of a board and to the parallel port of
another computer which just holds a file with the bios image. This would
make defelopment and testing *quite* faster. Has anyone experiences with
this or does anyone know whether there are ready, cheap solutions for
this?

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.