Any UK DiskOnChip Retailers?

[Steve M. Gehlbach]

> Just having had a look at one of the BIOS flash vendors - there are now
> devices up to 8Mbit available for both firmware hub and LPC - one
> vendor in
> particular has an 8Mbit flash device which attaches directly to LPC.
...
> I guess this all depends upon the application - is the
> application a purely
> embedded solution with only flash being used, or is it a case of
> being able
> to fit a kernel into the BIOS chip - for the latter case, I guess 8Mbit
> would be adequate.
>

Yes, the SST49LF080A- 8Mbit and it has 4bits of strap options so (it
appears) you can have 16 of these.  I don't know how multiport termination
works on LPC, though.  These parts are pretty cheap too, at least, I have
the 020A and it was a little over US$1.

But CF is probably better if you need lots of size, although I have also
been thinking about using a raw partition on the hard disk.  Has anyone
tried this?  The idea is to put vmlinux.bin.gz in hda1 (raw, using dd),
which is say, 10MB.  You know where hda1 is, just one cylinder over from the
start.  Then the ext2 fs is in hda2, which is the rest of the disk.  The ide
routines in linuxbios work fine for this, although the partition table
skip-over is hardcoded and needs to be made a variable.

Anyone done this already or have comments?

-Steve