Ronald G. Minnich rminnich@lanl.gov wrote:
for now my user interface is simple: it's linux. You get to control/config via /dev/bios, or maybe even via sysctl and /proc/bios. To get at these things you can come in over the net via ssh (it's linux, remember: all things are possible), or run a TK-based tool that accesses and changes this stuff, or use a nice GNOME thing, or linuxconfig, or emacs bios-mode, or if you really need it have a simple command interpreter in the kernel. But I am utterly opposed to having BIOS do full-screen junk: let a user program running under the OS do that.
Agreed, userland is a much better place for such things. To blow my own trumpet *parp*, This kind of stuff probably fits in quite well in Powertweak (http://linux.powertweak.com)
A lot of the stuff already included is the sort of stuff that Award have been offering for some time in their BIOSen. Ability to play with RAM timings etc, L2 cache latencies etc.. Though I currently only support the chipsets I have here to experiment on, it's not much work for someone to add support for their own chipsets.
There's also code already in place to deal with setting some Linux-specific options in /proc. Could easily be extended to deal with /dev (and probably will be now that devfs is getting more and more mainstream)
regards,