From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "David S. Miller" Date: Tue, 14 Jul 1998 07:00:29 +0000 Subject: Re: Ultra AXmp Message-Id: List-Id: References: In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: ultralinux@vger.kernel.org Date: Mon, 13 Jul 1998 21:44:51 -0400 From: Shannon On this note, does Sun have anything that will emulate x86 BIOS? My Alphastation runs the BIOS for all my PCI cards via emulation in the ROM during bootup. No they don't, and personally I feel this was a good decision. We had argued internally inside the UltraPenguin team whether we should add such a thing to either our bootloader or the kernel itself. We balked for two reasons: 1) It's heavily complex, even 'real PC' machines crash on bootup due to really strange x86 firmware found on some PCI cards. It would take several long months of non-stop work to get this right. 2) We felt that in no case were users being left totally out of luck because we lacked this "feature". My main reason for agreeing with Sun for not providing such a thing is simple, it's silly to further encourage PCI card manufacturers to continue writing CPU-specific firmware. I know it's a pipe dream to get them to stop entirely... (and note IMHO things like OBP are the right way to go, CPU independant and quite portable) And yes I realize how much the way PCI is implemented on PC's drives what the "PCI standard" really is. Later, David S. Miller davem@dm.cobaltmicro.com