[OpenBIOS] OpenBIOS: reality check

[Pavel Machek]

Hi!

> The purpose of a BIOS is to create independence between hardware and
> operating system.

Used to be... :-(.

At least linux uses almost nothing off bios due to performance it
costs.

> A streamlined BIOS can be quite compact. For example, my own BIOS, tinyBIOS,
> is about 10k lines of assembly source, < 16KB of object
> code). The code is mostly 16 bit, with 32 bit code used where it
> makes sense (e.g. memory test) or is required (32 bit PCI entries).
> 16 bit code is more compact.

Hmm, nice. What license is tinyBIOS under? ;-).

> Assuming no unnecessary delays, system startup time is dominated by
> hard disk spinup time, and cannot be reduced any further.

You do not need to spin up harddrives during bootup. At least not
*all* hardrives. 

> Finally, who are you writing this for ? For the individual user, I
> think it will be better to leave the BIOS on their system board
> alone. The savings in boot time etc. will never pay back for the
> effort spent playing with the BIOS.

AmiWinbios is trash, and I'm stuck with it. It costed me about 2 days
to make it work with big disk. You ask why? Well, to turn ON LBA in
amiwinbios, you have to set 'Hard disc LBA setting' to OFF. Yes, it is
their bug.

It would be nice if bios was able to netboot, for example. Serial
console might be nice. (Below me is 386 which I can not setup because
screen is set to VGA in bios and it has HGC attached. For a long time
it had only serial line attached, so I was lucky it booted and was
unable to touch anything.)

								Pavel

-- 
I'm really pavel at atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz. 	   Pavel
Look at http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/ ;-).

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