Some stuff...

[Mircea Ciocan]

M Carling wrote:
> 
> Welcome!
> 
> I'm the FAQ maintainer, so I'll try to answer your questions.
> 
> OpenBIOS is envisioned to serve the needs of MB manufacturers, hobbyists,
> and embedded systems developers.
> 
	Great... :)
> There is no list archive yet, AFAIK. This is something we need to do.
> 
	O.K., I'll keep every message on my computer, it seems from the low
traffic that my 10GB disk won't be filled right away ;) and I'll try to
setup a digest and an archive. BTW. feel free to forward me any relevant
old message.

> The guidelines are still flexible. About the only thing on which there
> seems to be a clear consensus (that had been controversial) is that
> OpenBIOS should support (as a compile time option) multiple chipsets
> in a single executable. This would enable MB manufacturers to compile
> one BIOS image for all their products.
> 
	And now the BIGGEST question: what will that BIOS be, a resource
configurator and OS loader and nothing after boot, or it will offer some
services to be used after boot, if so what services and how? I think
that is the fundamental part of the design guidelines.	Related: are
those guidelines somewere in a written format, is about the IEEE 1275
ummm.... thing ??????
	As for multi-chipset, multi-processor support I think is a good thing
and Award's approach with a BIOS boot block who probe and then
decompress and load in the shadow memory the relevant module archives
stored in ROM is the best, of course YMHO. But somehow I don't thing
that the resultant image will be small enogh to be hold in a 128KB Flash
like now, I belive this  mostly irellevant for Main Boards manufacturers
but a BIG deal for embedded systems, of course somebody could want to
compile in only the necessary modules.

> There is no subproject leader for embedded systems, at this time.
> 
	Then to put in another way, is anybody on this list doing embedded
BIOS/systems now ??? Please answer here or e-mail me so we can figure
out somethig because unfortunately in a embedded system we have a
totally different thingie like no "simple" OS loader, maybe even no OS
at all, but just a highly optimised API framework and yes I know that
somewere is a grossly over-priced Embedded DOS but I don't thing this is
a solution. Sugestions and comment wellcome :). 
> The leader is Stefan Reinauer <stepan at linux.de>
> 
> I don't have any docs on the boards you asked about.
> 
	All right, I'll cry just once more:  :)

	PLEAZZ, pleazz, if some one has access at ALI chips ( mostly ALI 6117C
and super I/O) detailed documentation get in touch with me, is important
for me and maybe for the Open Source movement. 

> Cheers,
> M
	All the best, Mircea C.