[OpenBIOS] OpenBIOS: reality check

[Pascal Dornier]

>Is your TinyBIOS commercial or is it somewhere available so that we could
>have a look at it? ;-)


tinyBIOS is a commercial product. At this point I don't think I can
afford to give away the farm. I could potentially release the source
for non-commercial use only, but not under GPL.

>I thought about USB keyboards 

I think USB keyboards are a lousy idea. I'd rather use USB ports for
devices that really need the bandwidth, and are a hassle to hook up
otherwise, such as a scanner. Once you get above two USB devices, you
will need a hub, and end up with a desk encrusted in USB cables...

>Wrong. Current BIOSs have a simple MSDOS system in their int-Code. MSDOS
>even doesn't have it's own filesystem code afaik..

News to me. My BIOS works pretty well without any file system. The
only place where some kind of file system is needed is for CD-ROM boot,
which I don't support at this point.

>> This is generally based on a trial and error detection procedure
>> (set biggest possible size, then find out how many address bits
>> really work), rather than presence detect bits.
>
>Again, modern PC Chipsets allow reading the exact RAM configuration out of
>their registers

Guess who sets this configuration ? The BIOS.

Do you seriously think a PC manufacturer would waste $0.50 on a input
port to read the presence detect bits, if he can detect the memory
configuration in software, and avoid compatibility problems with SIMMs
that don't have the right configuration ?

PC designers would sell their grandmother for savings of $10 a system...

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Pascal Dornier   pdornier at pcengines.com     http://www.pcengines.com
Your Spec      + PC Engines            = Custom Embedded PC Hardware
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