Option ROM for Device.

[ron minnich]

On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, Stefan Reinauer wrote:

> * 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.

yes, although I have always hoped it would be enough to count on
open-source linux drivers, we still need expansion rom support today.
There's a cluster at Argonne that needs an old-fashioned BIOS on the nodes
that have a certain model RAID-SCSI controller. They want linuxbios, and
we need to do expansion roms first.

ron