[LinuxBIOS] What to implement "system recovery" features in bios

li pan purpureleaf at gmail.com
Thu Jan 18 17:20:17 CET 2007


Hi, guys
I want to implement system recovery features in bios.
The basic idea is:
When booting, the user hit some key to enter our program, or else go
for the normal boot process.
The user can use the bios to back up his os. If the os fails and can't
boot, he can fix his
os using the backup. And he will be able to use bios to browse his hard disk.
Basically like some features found on some HP,IBM's pcs.

I have done windows and linux system programming but have never touch
BIOS, I think maybe linuxbios can help me. Here is my questions:

1 Can linuxbios do this stuff? I think most likely it is yes:-)

2 This will be installed on some pcs which run linux, windows or other
os. So maybe we need the award/ami bios coexist with linuxbios on the
same pc. ( We will assemble these pcs, we can choose which type of
mainboard to use, so there will be only one type of "old" bios)
Is this possible?I mean we want to  let award bios to serve normal os,
and linuxbios to do the system recovery stuff. Maybe change some part
of award bios to let it boot linuxbios once user hit the key.

We don't mind if we can simply throw award bios away, but we want to
make sure our pcs can run any "normal" os.

3 How much space will all these take? Can we fit them is one bios
chip? I don't know how IBM do these, maybe they use another chip to
store their system recovery program,  this feature can be found on old
ibm pcs, but in those days, bios chip was small.

4 Most import, am I on the right track? I am not familiar with low
level programming ( not this low), sorry if my idea sounds too crazy.


Thanks!




More information about the coreboot mailing list