Michael Poole <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I had not considered that. For some functions[1], I believe the > kernel does have to call the BIOS, but most of the time it need not. > It should be possible to remove those features of the kernel to > "contrib," though, so it is not as fundamental as the boot loader's > dependency on the BIOS. > > [1]- I think mostly related to power management.
Indeed. The ACPI interpreter in the kernel exists for the sole purpose of extracting non-free code from the system BIOS, interpreting it and then running it on the host CPU. Much modern hardware will fail to boot if this isn't possible. It's actually fairly trivial to write GPLed ACPI tables - the specification is online, and Intel supply a compiler. For a large range of machines, it's also easy to replace the image in flash (There are tools available to split up the chunks of Phoenix and Award BIOSes, and the ACPI tables just fall out as a separate chunk. Replace them, relink the BIOS and reflash it, and you're away - I've done work more complicated than this without any trouble before). -- Matthew Garrett | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
