Re: Anybody still here?

[James Oakley]

Pill Ingo wrote:
> This is very easy ETEQ chipsets are relabelled VIA
> chipsets, in older versions also the VENDOR strings etc identified the
> chips as VIA - Products
> , i dont know whether ETEQ did change these strings, but the chips
> themselves  are still VIA-chipsets.
> ( due to licence contracts )
> example : VIA VPX = ETEQ EQ82C661X PCI

Really? How about say, a 82c6638/6629 AGP chipset? Where would one go
find out which chipset matches which? I guess 'll be working on VIA
chipsets, that's a relief, Eteq is a hard to find company.

Relabelled, well I'll be..

I was looking at an interesting spec today, the BIOS Boot spec. It
appears to push BIOS functionality similar to what has been suggested
here, such as letting the user pick which device to boot from if a
certain key is hit during the boot process. It also allows a
non-bootable or non-functioning device to tell the bios that it has
failed to boot by calling int 18h, returning control to the bios so that
it can attempt a boot of the next available device. It also suggests
that BIOS designers should think of any device as capable of booting
from parallel, serial, USB, etc.

All in all an interesting read.

It can be gotten from http://www.pheonix.com/products/specs.html

There's also some other neat documents there.

James Oakley

Bios Specifications

[Stefan Reinauer]

On Sat, 6 Mar 1999, James Oakley wrote:
> I was looking at an interesting spec today, the BIOS Boot spec.

Many of our ideas are from OpenFirmware IEEE-1275-1994. I saw that
specification from Phoenix and it sounded nice. But it was too
IA16-structured in my eyes and needs a bit of "platform cleanup"
What is a vision in my mind is at least a partly implementation of
IEEE-1275. Check out the OpenBIOS homepage for details on that IEEE
standard.
> that it can attempt a boot of the next available device. It also
> suggests that BIOS designers should think of any device as capable of
> booting from parallel, serial, USB, etc.

Hmm.. The Alpha AXP "Firmware" MILO uses parts of the Linux kernel linked
against the bios to support all hardware supported by Linux. This *may* be
a nice idea but on the other hand, it may be too bloated for a small 128kb
Flash

Regards,
    Stefan Reinauer