Option ROM for Device.

[Stefan Reinauer]

* Eric W. Biederman <ebiederman at lnxi.com> [030806 05:47]:
> There are a couple of sides of this.
> 1) Anyone who supports Linux on non-x86 generally has a reasonable
>    Linux driver that does not need an option rom to set anything up.
>    This includes most hardware raid vendors.
 
Still, this is not always enough. I cursed many times when the x86
emulation on Alpha machines was not capable of executing the hacks
some vendors put in their option roms, which prevents video or
booting from scsi from working.

> 3) If we are running Linux if we can't get programming information
>    from the vendor so there is an open source driver we generally
>    don't want to use the hardware.   Which is why ADLO is not
>    an especially high priority.
 
This is also a matter of effort. I'd definitely prefer having the
graphics hardware vendors write initialization firmware for their
device than to do that myself for every vendor whose graphics card
I happen to use. In clusters this would not matter. It's all the same
hardware anyways, and no video is needed. But for many other
applications it's really useful.

  Stefan

-- 
Architecture Team
    SuSE Linux AG