status of openbios

Hi All,

I am interested in putting in some effort in getting OpenBIOS going.  I am
a BIOS engineer
and see value in GPL'ed BIOS source code.  How far is the development so
far?
What has been talked about?

Thanks
-Alex

[Simon Richter]

[e-mail] wrote:
> I am interested in putting in some effort in getting OpenBIOS going.  I am
> a BIOS engineer
> and see value in GPL'ed BIOS source code.  How far is the development so
> far?
> What has been talked about?

Well, there's not much happening here... In fact, nothing since two weeks...
:-/

Well, my idea would be to customize a linux kernel so that it could provide
BIOS functionality, i.e. remove the code that tries to gather info from the
existing BIOS, and define a standard interface for bootup (the old one is
unnecessary primitive, since we have full fs access).

This would add much overhead to the booting process, but the result would
still be faster than the method used now (well, my kernel needs 1.5 seconds,
including decompression, to reach "mounted root fs" state).

CU
   Simon

[Stephen Williams]

[e-mail] said:
> Well, my idea would be to customize a linux kernel so that it could
> provide BIOS functionality, i.e. remove the code that tries to gather
> info from the existing BIOS

If someone can provide some gas compatible 16bit x86 assembler that
gets the processor into 32bit mode, I have code that understands PCI
bus scanning and mapping. It's for an i960Rx base board, but can be
adapted.

If someone else adds some drivers for keyboard and display, and I can
contribute a multi-threaded run-time, complete with compiler and a TCL
interpreter.