As a newbie on the list I allow my self a couple of critical remarks and a few possible stupid questions.
A quick scan of historical postings makes me think the group would benefit from clearing up a few things.
There seems to be a demand for having certain functions in ROM. File system code has been mentioned, and also a boot loader of some kind to get rid of LILO.
Making the BIOS be more than a BIOS would be a mistake in my opinion. The BIOS is sopposed to be the hardware abstraction layer, and I think it should be kept that way.
If we need a better BIOS, then we should build one. I think a discussion on BIOS topics and how we could improve it, would do us good. Please don't confuse it with where the BIOS is stored. Pulling a new BIOS from disk after startup from a primitive ROM based BIOS, is ok. If the code is a hardware abstraction layer, it is still a BIOS.
If we would like to move code normally kept on disk to ROM, like putting file system code or a LILO-killer in ROM, then let us do so. But let us not make it part of the hardware abstraction layer code.
So what are the goals? Putting file system code, a LILO-killer, networking software or other code in ROM because it is better than pulling it from disk? Or is it to build a better hardware abstraction layer? Or both?
If I may suggest a utility that I think belongs in ROM rather than on disk: an improved memory test. Note, I did not say I think it should be part of the BIOS code, just that it should reside in ROM.
(ROM is, by the way, a pretty hopeless acronym because a read only memory is totally useless. Even PROM doesn't make any sense, how can one program a read only memory? If we'd known better back in the stone age, we would have called it a WORMM, write once read many memory, or something...)
For the benefit of further discussions, I suggest we somehow make it clear wether we are talking about putting non-BIOS type of code in ROM or if we are talking about actual BIOS code.