Philosophical question...

[Matthew Sullivan]

Hi

Charles Esson wrote:

> A bios has to provide enough support to load a program. Now where are you going to
> load the program from. A floppy, nope that's stupid. From harddisk, why, what
> great note from heaven said all computers come with a hard disk.

Failsafe loading?  Should be from a floppy/network/any other device that doesn't need
a lot of code to initialize and grab code from... (or one that does, but comes with
it's own initialization code - see below)

> It is my view the network is the only sensible place to load it from.

>
> So a bios has to load a OS ( application),

Not so...

> and has to have network code so it can
> load from the logical location.

This shouldn't be too dificult anyhow, if you have a netcard boot prom, the code from
that could be used to get a config/boot file, and in the 'safe' code mode, a flash
image be collected instead of the normal boot code.  Floppy disk support should be
used, you might find that the 'safe' image with IDE code will get to big to have it in
a failsafe area.

>
> In a perfect world the bios should hide from the OS the hardware. New hardware
> should be able to add CPU independent drivers.
>
> For a well thought out and complete answer to this question take look at IEEE
> 1275. Unfortunately like all complex questions the complete answer is not simple
> to follow.
>
> Now for the last statement, nobody is doing embedded control.
>
> Yes I am, and I will ask the question, for embedded control why do you want to
> boot an OS. You can fit a lot of code ( including the OS) in a $10 flash.
>

Yours

Matthew

PS Appologies if you were not refering to the 'protected' (failsafe) bios code.
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