Need help with LinuxBIOS speech

[Eric W. Biederman]

"SIVAKUMAR SUBRAMANI" <sivakumar.subramani at wipro.com> writes:

> Hi,
> 
> Even  I am planning to give a speech on LinuxBIOS.
> I found that some of the recent mail on this thread is useful for my
> preparation.
> Also when I was reading the HOWTO documents, I found that we need to
> burn Linux Kernel image along with the linuxbios image on DOC chip. If
> that is the case, Is there is any way to support for other Operating
> system (or) other flavor of unix system to use LinuxBIOS? What are the
> standard interface / Supports  we expect from those operating system?

Knowing what the architecture is might help here.

Essentially LinuxBIOS is split into 2 pieces.
1) LinuxBIOS
2) A bootloader.

The core of LinuxBIOS just initializes and sets up hardwre.  The hardware
setup is communicated to everything else through the LinuxBIOS table
which is loaded at a fixed location early in ram.  After that the bootloader
is loaded.

Currently the bootloader can be the final Linux kernel to run.  A
linux kernel for booting linux from linux or etherboot.  (And not the
code copied from etherbooot in the LinuxBIOS source tree).

The bootloader is formatted as a static ELF executable.  And is loaded
normally from a rom chip.  

The bootloaders that LinuxBIOS has are not limited to static ELF
executables but that is pretty much the one common type they will
all accept.  Grumble about beoboot Grumble.

So any operating system that can be formated as a static ELF
executable, and can be trained to read the LinuxBIOS table instead of
making BIOS calls can be used with LinuxBIOS. 

Eric