sis 630 boots to multiuser from nvram from power-on

[Ronald G Minnich]

As of today, for the first time, we're booting to multiuser linux from a
power-on. This is on the sis 630.

The BIOS is dead!

caveats:
1) the sisfb code is not working yet, we're using a matrox again. SiS 
   is working hard on this one.
2) from power on, linux boots so fast that our ide hard disk is not ready, 
   so does not show as present. The cdrom doesn't have such a problem. 
   So you have to hit reset :-(
   This is going to mean a kernel repair possibly. Not sure. 
   I don't want to handle this in the traditional sleep(3) fashion. 
   There's way too much of that nonsense in Linux already, esp. 
   in /etc/rc.d/*
3) It's only going to use 64M of ram, no matter what you put in there. 
   We're working on that. I've figured out how to have linuxbios
   pass params to the kernel. Hint: it's not something mentioned on this
   list yet :-)

The image at the sourceforge can be used to generate the romimage that
works. The bootup really is shockingly fast, it's quite fun.

unrelated news: james hendricks may have fixed SDRAM on the L440GX. Memory
seems to be working from power-up. We may have two different machines
working by Friday.

ron

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Ronald G Minnich  wrote:
> from power on, linux boots so fast that our ide hard disk is not ready, 
> so does not show as present. The cdrom doesn't have such a problem. 
> So you have to hit reset :-(
> This is going to mean a kernel repair possibly. Not sure. 
> I don't want to handle this in the traditional sleep(3) fashion. 
> There's way too much of that nonsense in Linux already, esp. 
> in /etc/rc.d/*

Ugh! Flashbacks to my Amiga 1200 days where I had a hard disk that didn't
spin up in time for the Kickstart to read it.  Later revisions of the
AmigaOS added a delay loop here.

A saner method would be to poll the IDE ports for a 'ready' signal.
But what about systems without IDE ?  We could add a timeout to the
poll loop.. Hmm, more thinking needed.
> It's only going to use 64M of ram, no matter what you put in there. 
> We're working on that. I've figured out how to have linuxbios
> pass params to the kernel. Hint: it's not something mentioned on this
> list yet :-)

What does /proc/nvram make of LinuxBIOS ?
Or are we not setting that up yet?

regards,

[Ronald G Minnich]

On 6 Jun 2000, Dave Jones wrote:
> What does /proc/nvram make of LinuxBIOS ?
> Or are we not setting that up yet?

good question. I'll look.

ron

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