OpenBIOS news.

[Todd Whitesel]

> > 1) Licence
> 
> I thought a bit about that too. I think it should be GPL, no sane
> person should consider the chip set registers or motherboard
> interconnect trade secrets. And why use another license if you have no
> secrets?

The way I look at it is: if we want the actual source code to be used in
lots of commercial projects, then it should be BSD based so that no one's
legal department makes trouble.

But if we are more concerned with providing "living documentation" for the
various chipsets -- actual, working examples of how to use all this hardware
-- then the GPL is probably better because it forces everyone who touches the
code base to give out at least the firmware source to anyone who buys their
product.

> I have my own agenda quite clear... First get the thing runnig on one or
> two chip sets, do FD and IDE read-only drivers, implement something like
> syslinux that can boot a hacked Linux kernel in PM from disk.
> After that we can start to take requests... :)

Yes, that sounds like the most important stuff. Once you can rough out a
protected mode startup environment, we can start talking to all the various
kernel groups (Linux, *BSD, Be, maybe even the commercial guys) and try to
hammer out a boot environment that the various kernels can all live with. I
don't expect this to be hard; most kernels should need the same basic stuff
-- "start me up with an identity memory map and a few megs at zero..." --
we might have to devise some data structures that communicate from the BIOS
to the kernel, and tell them what to expect.

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com