[OpenBIOS] sis 630 boots to multiuser from nvram from power-on

Ronald G Minnich rminnich at lanl.gov
Mon Jun 5 22:51:00 CEST 2000


As of today, for the first time, we're booting to multiuser linux from a
power-on. This is on the sis 630. 

The BIOS is dead! 

caveats:
1) the sisfb code is not working yet, we're using a matrox again. SiS 
   is working hard on this one.
2) from power on, linux boots so fast that our ide hard disk is not ready, 
   so does not show as present. The cdrom doesn't have such a problem. 
   So you have to hit reset :-(
   This is going to mean a kernel repair possibly. Not sure. 
   I don't want to handle this in the traditional sleep(3) fashion. 
   There's way too much of that nonsense in Linux already, esp. 
   in /etc/rc.d/*
3) It's only going to use 64M of ram, no matter what you put in there. 
   We're working on that. I've figured out how to have linuxbios
   pass params to the kernel. Hint: it's not something mentioned on this
   list yet :-)

The image at the sourceforge can be used to generate the romimage that
works. The bootup really is shockingly fast, it's quite fun. 

unrelated news: james hendricks may have fixed SDRAM on the L440GX. Memory
seems to be working from power-up. We may have two different machines
working by Friday.

ron

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