Re: [OpenBIOS] User-extentions (was Re: More comments and a proposal...)

[Chris Arguin]

On Tue, 24 Feb 1998, Stefan Reinauer wrote:
> On Fri, 20 Feb 1998, Chris Arguin wrote:
> > All things considered, you really don't want to flash the BIOS too often,
> > and especially not behind the users back, so to speak. As pointed out
> > before, we could always reserve a parition on the disk, which would allow
> > for extra code and data. This just strikes me as kinda kludgy...
>
> Why not? Award BIOS does this, Windows 95 does this. As we participate at
> "The right thing to do[tm]" we should be allowed to do so, too.

Microsoft does a lot of things the wrong way :)
> This allows having no disk at all. It could be possible, too, to receive
> BIOS settings over the net (or from disk). Maybe this should be made
> dependent on whether you have a disk or networking card or not.

I think everyone has agreed that this will be modular enough that if you
don't like a feature, don't use it.

I belive someone mentioned that there limits to how many times you can
flash most chips. If so, then we definitly don't want to do it every
bootup, especially if we are supporting DOS/Windows :)

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User-extentions (was Re: More comments and a proposal...)

[Jim Morris]

Chris Arguin wrote:
> I belive someone mentioned that there limits to how many times you can
> flash most chips. If so, then we definitly don't want to do it every
> bootup, especially if we are supporting DOS/Windows :)

Most EEPROM or FLASH devices (the "Flash" device on my motherboard is
actually EEPROM) have 10,000 write cycles guaranteed by the
manufacturer.  Some FLASH or EEPROM devices can go as high as 100,000
writes - but more often than not, 10,000 is a safer bet.

So, how long would it take to reboot a PC 10,000 times? ;-)  Personally,
I would prefer NOT to see my BIOS device written to on every system boot
- although I assume this is what the Award BIOS does when it says
"Updating ECSD tables...".  Actually, Award only rewrites these
PNP-related tables when they see a change in the ISA PNP card
configuration...