On Sat, 6 Mar 1999, James Oakley wrote:
I was looking at an interesting spec today, the BIOS Boot spec.
Many of our ideas are from OpenFirmware IEEE-1275-1994. I saw that specification from Phoenix and it sounded nice. But it was too IA16-structured in my eyes and needs a bit of "platform cleanup" What is a vision in my mind is at least a partly implementation of IEEE-1275. Check out the OpenBIOS homepage for details on that IEEE standard.
that it can attempt a boot of the next available device. It also suggests that BIOS designers should think of any device as capable of booting from parallel, serial, USB, etc.
Hmm.. The Alpha AXP "Firmware" MILO uses parts of the Linux kernel linked against the bios to support all hardware supported by Linux. This *may* be a nice idea but on the other hand, it may be too bloated for a small 128kb Flash
Regards, Stefan Reinauer