> Question, has anyone tried booting freebsd on raw hardware, i.e. absent a
> bios? I am curious as to how good a job it can do if, e.g., no enable bits
> are set in PIIX4, BARs are not set on PCI devices, no IRQs are assigned,
> and so on. Anyone feel they are close enough to this to say?
Not good.
You'd also have to take care of PCI setup, interrupt routing, any
board-specific hacks using the GPIO bits, etc. (eg. on most systems
you'll need to turn the CPU fan, power LEDs, etc. on) Doing this without
the BIOS is likely to be a major PITA, and different for every single
board. Outside of some expensive and boring embedded vendors' products,
you're unlikely to get the sort of information you need without
reverse-engineering the BIOS that's already there.
> See www.acl.lanl.gov/linuxbios to see why I am asking. I see no reason I
> could not also put FreeBSD as the BIOS in nvram as well. If you're trying
> to build a cluster, you have to kill the BIOS.
Well, they're going to have the same basic stuff, and I can see that
they're not having much fun trying to get there.
I'm curious as to what you mean by "have to kill the BIOS" though; I'm
not seeing why it's an issue.
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