[OpenBIOS] Probably a dumb question - Intel MB DG45ID

[Philip Rhoades]

Mark,


On 2013-12-28 21:38, Mark Cave-Ayland wrote:
> On 28/12/13 02:41, Philip Rhoades wrote:
> 
>> People,
>> 
>> I have been on this list for some time lurking - just because I think 
>> it
>> is interesting that a bit of firmware can allow hardware to be 
>> actually
>> useful! I haven't done more than read the occasional post that was of
>> interest but the thought occurred to me again about replacing the BIOS
>> that is on my current machine with something that is open so I went 
>> back
>> to the OpenBIOS home page but was a bit puzzled to see on the Download
>> page: "Do not try to put OpenBIOS in a real boot ROM, it will not work
>> and may damage your hardware!". After a little more looking around I 
>> am
>> still confused - the ultimate aim of this software is to eventually
>> allow people to replace their proprietary BIOSes right? I have an 
>> Intel
>> MB DG45ID but I couldn't Google much overlap with OpenBIOS . .
>> 
>> Thanks for any enlightenment!
>> 
>> Regards,
>> 
>> Phil.
> 
> Hi Phil,
> 
> Basically there are two parts to the problem here: one is the
> low-level hardware initialisation, while the second is adding the
> required support for boot.
> 
> For low-level hardware initialisation, you'd need to use coreboot and
> add OpenBIOS as an ELF payload - I did try this a few years back and
> managed to get a Forth prompt working under QEMU. But there are some
> things that OpenBIOS doesn't know, for example how much physical RAM
> is in the machine which at the moment is obtained through a
> QEMU-specific interface.
> 
> I suspect this is why the warning exists, as accessing these
> QEMU-specific addresses will have undefined behaviour on real
> hardware. So unless you can talk to coreboot then you'd need to
> hardcode some specific defaults (which I believe is probably the
> approach used by http://temlib.org to enable OpenBIOS to work on their
> SPARC board).
> 
> Finally if you are using Intel hardware then you'll find that the
> support is a lot weaker than other architectures (for example x86
> OpenBIOS is currently real mode only, no PE support). My guess is that
> this is because for more modern hardware, people are focusing their
> efforts on developing open UEFI firmwares instead.


Hmmm . . looks like I should be following tianocore on Sourceforge as 
well . .

Thanks,

Phil.
-- 
Philip Rhoades

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Australia
E-mail:  phil at pricom.com.au