[OpenBIOS] User-extentions (was Re: More comments and a proposal...)

[Chris Arguin]

On Mon, 23 Feb 1998, Pavel Machek wrote:

> Hi!
> 
> > The core-bios would boot up like most BIOSes do now, by requiring lilo or
> > something like that. But with the user-extention to support ext2fs and
> > FAT, you could then do something closer to the Sun bootloader.
> 
> Sun bootloader does *NOT* have any filesystem hardcoded. It just knows
> how to boot initial 8K block from SCSI (something like MBR) and pass
> command line to it. It is this 8K block which knows filesystems.

That is a good solution as well. With most of the proposals we have had,
we have no use for the MBR anymore. Looking at the LILO docs, it looks
like we have 446 bytes, assuming we leave the partition table intact...
Not enough room to put in simple filesystem calls, I think. Too bad.

> I don't think bios should understand fs: you don't want to have
> partition just because of booting. I do not think that we should
> change current system anytime soon.

I tend to agree with you that it would be best to leave filesystem code
out of the bios. But I do want the ability to specify a path to boot, and
that requires somebody at boottime have filesystem code.

> PS: Did anyone try to flash that bochs bios into flash and see if it
> boots?

You would still have to add all the hardware initialization and boot code.
Probably not all that hard, but it would take a little while.

--
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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