That sounds right. So why have a new LILO? Why not just not need LILO anymore?
Because of flexibility? And we don't need to use LILO. We might tech the firmware of a (OS independent) boot FS that could hold the boot loader. Afaik. Sun does something like this.
I like the idea of having the BIOS know how to load the kernel itself. Most filesystems can be read from with a fairly small amount of code. Let people compile into their BIOS however much code they want depending on which filesystems they actually plan to use.
If we can allow the kernel and BIOS to use much of the same source code for drivers, then there is no need to ever call into the BIOS once the kernel is loaded. This eliminates stupid problems caused by the BIOS wanting parts of the system to be one way and the kernel wanting them to be another.
The main reason I do not like OpenFirmware is that it presumes a slow, frozen driver in ROM with its own frozen idea of how interrupts and DMAs should work will be good enough that my kernel will never want to replace it. Yeah, right.
Todd Whitesel toddpw @ best.com