[OpenBIOS] OpenBIOS: reality check

[Chris Arguin]

On Mon, 23 Feb 1998, Pavel Machek wrote:

> > The purpose of a BIOS is to create independence between hardware and
> > operating system.
> 
> Used to be... :-(.
> 
> At least linux uses almost nothing off bios due to performance it
> costs.

The performance hit is in two places. Currently you have to switch to
real-mode, which I would propose we would fix. Secondly, if the BIOS isn't
shawdowed you are using much slower accesses.

> > Assuming no unnecessary delays, system startup time is dominated by
> > hard disk spinup time, and cannot be reduced any further.
> 
> You do not need to spin up harddrives during bootup. At least not
> *all* hardrives. 

Interesting point... At the least, you don't really have to wait for them
to be done until you actually go to load code off of them. Sure would
speed up my boottime, since the SCSI drives take a while to get going.

> AmiWinbios is trash, and I'm stuck with it. It costed me about 2 days
> to make it work with big disk. You ask why? Well, to turn ON LBA in
> amiwinbios, you have to set 'Hard disc LBA setting' to OFF. Yes, it is
> their bug.

Ouch! My BIOS doesn't boot SCSI, which is rather annoying. 

--
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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