PCI card bios accessibility

[Eric W. Biederman]

Tina Declerck <tdeclerck at 3ware.com> writes:

> Thank you.  I'm not questioning the functionality of the driver, however,
> some customers like to configure 3ware RAID using the 3ware bios.  If it
> is called during the system boot the driver isn't involved. This is not
> taking anything from existing functionality but trying to see if
> the functions currently available with other BIOSes is or will be available
> with the Linux BIOS.


Wrong assumption.  The long term plan is to call the linux driver
to boot off of cards.  The linux kernel will be used in our bootloader.
I am in the process of working out the size constraint issues.

The perception of a significant chunk of our customer base is that if
you can't do it from linux you can't do it.  So classic PC-BIOS
firmware compatibility is simply a nice to have, and I don't see it
extending beyond an optional feature.

Video cards have a special place in nuisance list.  But what
a video card requires from firmware is different from what a RAID card
with a menu to configure things requires.  And even the video card
BIOS support will be optional.

Eric