On Thu, 5 May 2005, James wrote:
For most of the legacy hardware: drives, floppy, CD, mouse, serial ports this may be true. But, let's think about ACPI, I2C, sensors, SMBus, Dallas one-wire, and the myriad of undocumented hardware/comm channels going on the motherboard. Not to mention that the evil one from redmond has convinced quite a few hardware vendors to pursue nefarious activities during the boot process.....
Afaik, the linux kernel does not use bios at all. Thats why linuxbios is using the linux kernel since it has built-in drivers to access whatever hardware it needs to access (+ the cold boot step of linuxbios to setup the hardware of course). Windows and *bsd is using bios calls so that's why linuxbios needs to emulate "normal" bios hooks via "adlo" (http://wiki.linuxbios.org/index.php/ADLO).
Have you actually removed a bios/flash chip or erased it after boot to test your theory? I think what you have said is true of older boards and some current vendors, but, certainly not is all cases....
http://wiki.linuxbios.org/data/howto/SiS630, scroll down to step 6...
Best regards
Peter K -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
