OpenFirmware and interrupt-map

Eric W. Biederman ebiederman at lnxi.com
Tue Feb 3 21:27:01 CET 2004


ron minnich <rminnich at lanl.gov> writes:

> I don't expect the cards to come with fcode any time soon, if ever. Four
> reasons: first, the market is more or less zero, and the all the non-x86 
> systems support x86 emulators to support the x86 option roms; 

For video.  Does any one support anything else?  RAID cards?

> second, 
> if they support two option roms (fcode, x86) that makes for lots more 
> work; third, the PC market will probably never go to fcode; and fourth, I 
> bet they (naively) think that fcode would make reverse engineering easier. 

Yes, there are reasons it is unlikely to happen and those are reasons I
really have not done much.  Stefan believes in it so I think it makes a good
test case of what we can support in LinuxBIOS.  Mostly this is if I had
to support the interface it would not suck to support :)

What I am actually thinking is the long term solution is to just use everyones
driver disks (or the equivalent) for linux and if the BIOS does not contain
the drivers you need it is just a rebuild of your boot loader away.  Yes
this means you have to boot your system once to load the driver for your
new cool boot device but that should always be possible.

Eric



More information about the coreboot mailing list