Ronald G Minnich wrote:
>
> On Thu, 15 Jun 2000, Sergey Babkin wrote:
>
> > Maybe I'm completely mistunderstanding the subject, but
> > what about EFI (Extendable Firmware Interface) ? It's the
>
> We're looking at it. Do you really believe in reference implementations? I
> don't. I sure hope they've stopped zeroing memory on reset ... this is one
> of the drivers for linuxbios.
Well, supposedly that reference implementation is what's inside
the Itanium boxes (actually the box I have access too has version
0.92 while the latest one is 0.99). Though maybe the published code
is not complete.
>
> But it is still interesting.
As far as I understand the idea is that you won't need to replace
the BIOS. It should have some limited pseudo-disk in flash memory
with a FAT-32 partition on it where the drivers and loaders can be
added as needed. Any kind of clustering initialization, or boot
loaders can be written as applications in EFI API. If that's not enough
then a special boot FAT-32 partition may be created on a disk (on any disk,
may create one (or maybe many - not sure) on each disk) where the rest
will be stored. BTW, EFI permits unlimited number of partitions on the disk
with size limited by 64-bit sector number. Microsoft has contributed
the FAT-32 code for the free reference implementation for free.
For example, Linux-64 stores it kernel, boot loader and boot parameters
file in this boot partition.
EFI also has a mini-shell which gives some rudimentary control from
the console, and yes, it supposedly supports the serial console.
I don't quite understand it yet (one of the features is
that the result of "help" command scrolls very fast, so only the last
screen can be seen) but I plan to look closer at it.
-SB
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