Jeff Garzik wrote:
*** Implement BIOS interrupts.
MS-DOS, LILO, and many other operating systems and programs use BIOS calls to communicate with the low-level hardware in a standard way. OpenBIOS needs the most popular BIOS calls implemented, so that DOS and others can allocate memory, read/write to the drives, and similar things.
At present there is no BIOS interrupt processing in OpenBIOS. So tasks include (a) add the necessary hooks for BIOS interrupt processing, and (b) implenting each BIOS call one-by-one.
Interested programmers should implement just one or two BIOS calls, then send me a patch. That way we can make the BIOS interrupt framework public, so that many others can work individually implementing various BIOS calls.
Also important is an OpenFirmware interface because we should migrate away from x86 real mode interupt system. OpenFirmware would give us a clean, standard way for boot loaders or OS's to talk to the hardware. It would give us a configuration interface (albeit not too simple). And we could include a couple (or one or three) bootloader packages, e.g. linux_boot, multi_boot, chain_boot.
-graham - To unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@freiburg.linux.de with 'unsubscribe openbios' in the body of the message