AW: Further modularization ideas

[Stephan Müller]

> 3)     If no display device is present, default to using an alternate
>        device as console. This would be very useful for blind nodes
>        and embedded systems. A simple version of this would be to
>        use the serial port. I could see future versions using the IRDA
>        port or another communication device.
Perhaps an interface for some NICs. (Telnet)
We can try to get specs of 3Com and other popular NICs and build a simple
code that acts
as a interface between the nic and openBIOS. So we can store this
interface-code on the
bootrom-socket on the NIC. And as an option openBIOS can have an interface
for Telnet.
Or SIO. Then you can connect an ordinary terminal to a system. :)

> 4)     Check for and initialize each of the possible boot devices.
>        A simple system may only have one boot device, a more complex
>        system may have many.
if more than one bootable device detected, there could be the posibility of
flashing a bootmanager-module that displays a list of bootable medias and
partitions.

> Can all code be limited to using relative addressing so no linking is
> necessary? Is this possible/reasonable? It would be nice to be able to
> create a boot ROM by simply selecting blocks of code and listing the
> starting address for each block in the executors table, no make files,
> assembly, compiling or linking required.
only in compiled version. Then we have to build a "customer-package" with
all available
modules inside. A menu-driven configurator that puts the desired modules
together and
packs them (LH5-algo?), so we can save much mem.

Cya,
	Stephan