[OpenBIOS] Dual BIOS Motherboards

[James Oakley]

Matthew Sullivan wrote:

> The full story at: http://www.giga-byte.com/gigabyte-web/whydual.htm
> 
> Probably on of the most useful boards on teh market I would say, though we
> would have to check that the first BIOS could be programed without altering
> the second BIOS code....

I saw this board a while back and was quite interested (in fact, I was
thinking of picking one up). The two main reasons for having the dual
flash is to protect from 1) flash virii, and 2) interrupted/corrupted
flash updating. Therefore, It should be quite neat for our purposes and
it doesn't matter what code you put on it.

The OB ISA card could easily mirror this functionality. You could, say,
put code to start with the other BIOS in the boot-block and restore the
original BIOS. Oh yeah, I haven't had time to prototype the card yet,
but I'm moving to a place with more room for doing work this weekend, so
I may actually get it working. Anybody have comments on the circuit?
I've never designed an ISA card before so I don't know if I fell into
any traps (yes, I know there are no caps and I know there should be
some, I'll play with that on my prototype card).

I don't know why I didn't think of it before, but, maybe it would be a
good idea to implement this functionality into OB itself. Like
automatically detecting a bad flash and reading from the other one. This
requires a slight hardware change to the card to allow writing to the
backup flash, but that's no biggie.

Besides, we will have to implement that functionality in order to
support that board at all. What if this dual-flash thing catches on?

James Oakley
jfunk at roadrunner.nf.net
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