If no display device is present, default to using an alternate device as console. This would be very useful for blind nodes and embedded systems. A simple version of this would be to use the serial port. I could see future versions using the IRDA port or another communication device.
Perhaps an interface for some NICs. (Telnet) We can try to get specs of 3Com and other popular NICs and build a simple code that acts as a interface between the nic and openBIOS. So we can store this interface-code on the bootrom-socket on the NIC. And as an option openBIOS can have an interface for Telnet. Or SIO. Then you can connect an ordinary terminal to a system. :)
Check for and initialize each of the possible boot devices. A simple system may only have one boot device, a more complex system may have many.
if more than one bootable device detected, there could be the posibility of flashing a bootmanager-module that displays a list of bootable medias and partitions.
Can all code be limited to using relative addressing so no linking is necessary? Is this possible/reasonable? It would be nice to be able to create a boot ROM by simply selecting blocks of code and listing the starting address for each block in the executors table, no make files, assembly, compiling or linking required.
only in compiled version. Then we have to build a "customer-package" with all available modules inside. A menu-driven configurator that puts the desired modules together and packs them (LH5-algo?), so we can save much mem.
Cya, Stephan