are there problems with this email? - what is a disc on chip? - beginner's question

[Eric W. Biederman]

steven james <pyro at linuxlabs.com> writes:

> Greetings,
> 
> For many mainboards, 256K is the limit due to not having all of the pins
> connected. 512 is a harder limit imposed by the 32 available pins on the
> flash chip. DoC gets around that by having page flipping built in (sort of
> like EMM from back in the 8088 days).
> 
> Newer chipsets and motherboards get around the address line limit using
> either LPC interface (a serialization of ISA into a much smaller pin
> count), or firmware hub (more or less Intel's take on LPC).

Currently in the LPC/firmware hub form factor I have seen chips as large
as 8mbit == 1MByte.  And theoretical limit is something like 4GB.  So
as larger flash chips become available we can use them.
 
> It is quite possible to get LinuxBIOS and a loader such as Etherboot into
> a conventional flash. From there the options for loading the kernel
> include network, IDE drive, or CF. A little work will allow floppy or
> CDROM.

Actually there is already a floppy driver in etherboot, though it
could probably use some stabilizing.  Only a CDROM drive requires some
real work.

Eric