On Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 08:37:38AM +0000, Mark Rogers wrote:
Jonathan McDowell wrote:
I ended up with an image that did serial console from the very beginning of boot and would then launch etherboot allowing me to boot from the network or it would time out waiting for a keypress after 5s and boot a kernel from disk. It boots a lot faster than a conventional BIOS (which is what interests a lot of people in it) and it gives you a lot more control (which is what interests me).
So that's serial console from right at the start of the BIOS?
Yup. Most modern server motherboards have the option to do that anyway these days, if they're anyway decent.
If you have a supported motherboard then you can cross your fingers and try to build and flash an image. However if it goes wrong you're a bit stuffed.
I might "invest" in a cheap EPROM programmer so I can play, but having looked at the BIOS Saviours in the past they're great products but overkill for anything I'm doing. I do have an old EPROM blower (and a UV prom erasor) kicking around somewhere, but I think technology might have moved on a bit past them now.
Don't underestimate the use of the BIOS Saviour; even with an EPROM programmer I ended up buying one, because the PLCC sockets on the Via boards aren't very robust and I had one pull away from the board after a few cycles of remove / program / insert / test / repeat. Also it's much faster to flick a switch rather than remove/insert/remove/insert a chip.
I know that some mobos have dual BIOS anyway (I think some Gigabyte boards did?), I presume that's a good starting point assuming the board is supported.
I don't know about how the dual BIOS stuff works; assuming they provide 2 full BIOSes then they should be ok.
J.