On Mon, Oct 16, 2006 at 10:05:15PM +0100, Stuart Henderson wrote: > On 2006/10/16 13:39, Ryan Corder wrote: > > On Mon, 2006-10-16 at 16:56 +0100, Stuart Henderson wrote: > > > are you using bios console redirection? if so, try changing it so > > > it only redirects the bios startup screens and _not_ the OS. > > > > the bios on my board forces it on...so I can't turn it off. I'm > > guessing the getty in Linux (agetty on Gentoo) acts a little different > > as it seems to take over once the machine has finished booting. > > I haven't used agetty, but I've heard Linux is more willing to > share with console redirection. I don't know why, though. > > I don't really understand why this is so hard for the big PC BIOS > makers to get right, either. Soekris and pcengines managed it (and > in a lot less code than the main BIOS vendors)...not to mention > all the various non-x86 systems.
Perhaps a digression; please excuse me for high jacking this thread. I am constantly worried about the silly binary blob called BIOS. To me it is the software that has evolved the least... I mean to say that I had to throw away my old machine since I wanted SATA support and USB booting just because I could not figure out how to upgrade the BIOS. And today's computers obviously have support for several contemporary devices in BIOS. It is certainly conceivable that down the line, this BIOS gets outdated. Of course, you have point and click web based BIOS upgrade(I have not tried it), but I am still very uncomfortable trusting a binary BLOB. I am not sure how mature linuxBIOS is. Someone in OpenBSD interested in getting into this? I can lend a helping hand if reqd. We can't start off supporting many motherboards of course, but it should be a good idea to fork off from linuxBIOS or even start from scratch. I think this idea gels well with OpenBSD's focus on openness and freedom. And for poor souls like me it will save an old computer and from today's computer getting outdated in future. A good analogy would be "BIOS software is as much a dinosaur as the battery.Very little innovation has taken place in reducing the size and improving the capacity of batteries over the years. regards, Girish
