[PROPOSAL] extended payload handling

[Stefan Reinauer]

* Greg Watson <gwatson at lanl.gov> [040608 15:22]:
> I think this is a reasonable idea, particularly your suggestion of 
> making linuxbios more modular. One of my main beefs with the payload 
> strategy is that each payload has to provide it's own set of, 
> potentially buggy, driver code. If we have 5 payloads then we have 5 
> sets of drivers that all do the same thing slightly differently. If the 
> drivers were modular enough so that a payload could call them directly, 
> then this would go a long way to addressing these concerns.

As far as I can tell the only drivers involved would be output drivers,
ie. video output and serial output. There the extensible LinuxBIOS table
could come into play. The video driver could store a pointer to the
framebuffer, the resolution and maybe even a font, to save duplicates.
Serial is only a kilobyte or so of a driver i think.

Have I forgotten something?


Stefan