Interrupts needed by LILO

[daniel.engstrom at riksnett.no]

On 28 Nov, Todd Whitesel wrote:

> I like the idea of having the BIOS know how to load the kernel itself.
> Most filesystems can be read from with a fairly small amount of code.
> Let people compile into their BIOS however much code they want depending
> on which filesystems they actually plan to use.
I don't like the idea of putting OS-specific knowledge in the firmware,
I think the firmware should load a file from the disk to a well-known
place in memory. This file could be the OS kernel if the kernel can cope
with this environment directly or it could be a secondary loader with
some OS specific knowledge that loads and perhaps relocated the kernel
in some arcane way.

 
> If we can allow the kernel and BIOS to use much of the same source code
> for drivers, then there is no need to ever call into the BIOS once the
> kernel is loaded. This eliminates stupid problems caused by the BIOS
> wanting parts of the system to be one way and the kernel wanting them
> to be another.
I don't think that the OS should have to call the FW after boot either,
but during the boot, however... 
 
> The main reason I do not like OpenFirmware is that it presumes a slow,
> frozen driver in ROM with its own frozen idea of how interrupts and DMAs
> should work will be good enough that my kernel will never want to replace
> it. Yeah, right.
Well, that was a property to OF that I was unaware of. What I like about
OF is the Forth code, the device tree and that is is a standard.

Daniel
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