John Labovitz wrote:
Markus Kaufmann kaufmann@pks-software.de said:
A BIOS isn't something that you change daily like the newest developer kernel. Once you have a perfect BIOS, you should never change it.
to interject a philosophical point here: this is why we're doing an *open* BIOS project -- to rid ourselves of the accepted myth that Thou Shalt Never Change The BIOS (unless the manufacturer tells you to, via an upgrade).
yes, we should make it clear that BIOS changes are dangerous and could result in a nonbooting system,
I haven't been following this list for more than a week, so forgive me if this has already been addressed.
Don't most of the modern BIOSs use the boot block feature of the flash devices to provide a mechanism for recovery when a BIOS update goes bad? I ported some Phoenix 4.0 source, and this was a feature they used. How will it be possible to overwrite an existing BIOS with an OpenBIOS when the boot block is already locked? Also, on all of the the MBs that I've used in the past two years, the system flash is SMD soldered to the board, so you can't exactly replace the devices easily.
Also, in response to issues of device capacity, some newer BIOSs are stored in a compressed format, and then shadowed as required. POST is decompressed into shadow RAM, executed and then overwritten by the run-time code. My project with the Phoenix code had an incredible amount of support for advanced features on a laptop, and it all fit into a 128K device (using compression).
michael
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