[olug] OT: annoying bios!

[Will Langford]

On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 11:21 AM, Phil Brutsche <phil at brutsche.us> wrote:

> Dan Linder wrote:
> > Pardon my ignorance, but is the OpenBIOS an option here, or don't they
> > support the Geode processors?  (Or would that level of change require a
> > physical EEPROM replacement?)
>
> Trying to shoehorn PXE support into the existing BIOS is probably a lot
> easier than trying to port
> LinuxBIOS/Coreboot/whatever-they-call-it-this-week to the custom
> hardware in question.
>

I've done alot to actually make much of our custom software be as BIOS
independent as possible.  So... other than the other-post-mentioned VSA
stuff -- assuming the Coreboot natively supports PXE on a RT8139/RT8169 (or
can deliver a tiny PXE payload) ... or can support BIOS extension
scanning... and fits with 256KB (or 240KB if needing to use an extension),
then all would theoretically go well.

If I need to actually write all of the GX1 soft-BIOS (I forget the name
Cyrix/NatSemi/AMD gave it) interrupts and all of that... uhhhh no :).
 That'd take forever - even with reverse engineering (illegal) the VSA stuff
supplied.  Doing it clean room would take at least a year undoubtedly :).

-Will