Supporting extension ROMs and beyond...

Eric W. Biederman ebiederman at lnxi.com
Mon Aug 11 15:55:31 CEST 2003


ron minnich <rminnich at lanl.gov> writes:

> On Mon, 11 Aug 2003, ron minnich wrote:
> 
> > For linuxbios to succeed in future, we'll need support for these two 
> > things. I think this is a lamentable state of affairs. But that's how it 
> > is.
> > 
> > I think long-term the best way to fix it for all architectures is via
> > emulation, but for the immediate-term we can make callback/binary support 
> > for the common(-est) case: the x86. 
> 
> I contradict myself. Either we need callbacks or we don't. If we get 
> emulation, we don't need them. Sorry for my confusing note. 
> 
> Eric, I am sympathy with what you are saying. There is a reality here -- 
> people want VGA and they want it on early. I want to accomodate this. 

Early is a problem unless we intimately know the video chipset.  We can
never accomodate early (as in all LinuxBIOS messages) with an option ROM.

For the option ROM solution the best we can do reliably is to run it
right after we run the LinuxBIOS core.

> Is emulation a suitable, architecture-independent way to achieve this? 
> I'm thinking it might be. Can we then build it in as an option when we 
> build a linuxbios?

Where to put this functionality, because we want it no matter which
bootloader we use is a good question.  My hunch is we make it some
sort of header.  

Because by early all we can really promise are the bootloader and the
kernel messages, at least via this route.

Eric




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