[OpenBIOS] Summary: Booting the OS

[Chris Arguin]

On Fri, 27 Feb 1998, Florian Wunderlich wrote:

> Here's the summary of our discussion about booting the OS and how it is
> done in the minicomputer world. This is not about integrating a new HAL
> into the BIOS; its just about how the BIOS should load and execute an OS
> from disk/net/... .

A very good summary. Too bad I'm snipping most of it :)

> To conclude, I think the only interesting thing is to improve lilo; without
> replacing the entire BIOS, I do not see any possibility to make things like
> diskless boot etc. work without Boot EPROMS on NICs.

Other bootloaders (Norton's Sytem Commander, I belive it is called, and
OS/2s, and others) actually use a partition on the disk. It would be nice
to see a version of LILO that did the same, and used that extra space to
support various filesystems.

> The best thing IMHO is to adopt OpenBoot for 80x86 machines. It has a
> well-thought concept, an UI (huh, forth :-), you can write your own
> hardware diagnostics, and with the secondary-loader-approach, you can do
> the other things as well.

I agree, for a few reasons. OpenBoot does seem to be fairly well done, and
more importantly it is a developed standard. We really shouldn't rush out
to invent a standard when we have an already existing one that seems to
have promise.

Off-the-wall idea #132: How much legacy BIOS support do we really need
*just* to boot DOS to the point that it loads config.sys and/or
autoexec.bat? If we supported just that much, and then had a program you
ran (first) in DOS that basically put a legacy BIOS in as if the real
BIOS had been shadowed, then we have the best of both worlds. A great BIOS
with that supports all the nice boot-stuff w/o too much legacy code, but
available legacy code when you need it for DOS.

Granted, emergency repairs to DOS/Win95 will be a pain (your rescue boot
disk will have to have the BIOS program on it), but most people who
will use this will do so for the OpenBoot support, which means they have
another OS to help them along.

--
Chris Arguin                 | "...All we had were Zeros and Ones -- And 
Chris.Arguin at unh.edu         |  sometimes we didn't even have Ones."
                             +--------------+	- Dilbert, by Scott Adams
http://leonardo.sr.unh.edu/arguin/home.html |



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