The DoC problem

Peter Stuge stuge-linuxbios at cdy.org
Sun Sep 8 23:39:00 CEST 2002


On Sun, Sep 08, 2002 at 08:24:35PM -0600, Ronald G Minnich wrote:
> Anybody have a good idea in the long term about how to solve the DoC mess.

Or maybe with a DoM, Disk-on-Module, instead.  That's more friendly to J R
Hacker at home, who doesn't want to mess with mystery ISA cards and probably
has a motherboard without ISA slots anyway.


> We need big flash. But we can't just put big flash in the IDE slot -- then
> we can't have a disk drive!

Well, you can still have one, right?  A DoM would only be either master or
slave on the IDE controller..


> Are we really stuck with 256K forever? is there some plugin that gives us
> FLASH AND a DoC?

Unless chipsets add more address lines to the ROM bus over night, I think
the solution will be a combination.  The standard flash and another thing.

It's a shame that it won't work out with just the flash chip though.  :(


If you want to construct stuff, you could make a kludge card that goes into
the standard BIOS socket and multiplexes between a regular flash and a DoC,
e.g. when a read at 0x0 occurs or maybe even by using some JEDEC trick, if
any are available or possible, without breaking the standard.


Nah..  Scratch that.

The memory needs to go on to some bus somewhere.  Which ones are available?
(Add more, I have surely missed several.)

AGP, PCI, ISA, LPC, ROM (flash socket on mobo), I2C, IDE, par/ser, USB

Plug and play flash memory is only available for three of these AFAIK:
ROM, IDE and USB.

Maybe USB flash memory is the way to go?  Do all chipsets have USB?


//Peter



More information about the coreboot mailing list