[OpenBIOS] What is the point, a new BIOS or utilities in ROM?

(Odd Skjaeveland) oskjaeve at sivos.rl.no
Wed Feb 25 13:31:13 CET 1998


As a newbie on the list I allow my self a couple of critical remarks
and a few possible stupid questions.

A quick scan of historical postings makes me think the group would
benefit from clearing up a few things. 

There seems to be a demand for having certain functions in ROM. File
system code has been mentioned, and also a boot loader of some kind to
get rid of LILO.

Making the BIOS be more than a BIOS would be a mistake in my opinion.
The BIOS is sopposed to be the hardware abstraction layer, and I think
it should be kept that way. 

If we need a better BIOS, then we should build one. I think a
discussion on BIOS topics and how we could improve it, would do us
good.  Please don't confuse it with where the BIOS is stored. Pulling
a new BIOS from disk after startup from a primitive ROM based BIOS, is
ok. If the code is a hardware abstraction layer, it is still a BIOS.

If we would like to move code normally kept on disk to ROM, like
putting file system code or a LILO-killer in ROM, then let us do so.
But let us not make it part of the hardware abstraction layer code.

So what are the goals? Putting file system code, a LILO-killer,
networking software or other code in ROM because it is better than
pulling it from disk? Or is it to build a better hardware abstraction
layer? Or both?

If I may suggest a utility that I think belongs in ROM rather than on
disk: an improved memory test. Note, I did not say I think it should
be part of the BIOS code, just that it should reside in ROM.


(ROM is, by the way, a pretty hopeless acronym because a read only
memory is totally useless. Even PROM doesn't make any sense, how can
one program a read only memory? If we'd known better back in the stone
age, we would have called it a WORMM, write once read many memory, or
something...)

For the benefit of further discussions, I suggest we somehow make it
clear wether we are talking about putting non-BIOS type of code in ROM
or if we are talking about actual BIOS code.

-- 
Odd Skjæveland
oskjaeve at sivos.rl.no

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