On Sun, 24 Jun 2001, you wrote:
> That's a position that would sound reasonable to someone working
> on Linux for legacy DEC/SGI systems, but not one that I would
> expect to satisfy someone working on embedded Linux. It would
> need to be governed by a config option, but I would think
> that ultimately we need to have a Linux that can be ROMed
> and branched to directly from the reset vector. Why force
> everyone doing an embedded MIPS/Linux widget to re-invent
> the wheel?
Because there are very good reasons for having a firmware seperate from
the OS. Otherwise, you're more or less proposing a new run-time-environment
that has to do all the hardware sanitizations and initializations before we
get to the bootstrap environment. That's going to be so system-specific and
disparate from the kernel that it doesn't, IMHO, make any sense to put it
there. This is especially true since *not* having it in the kernel gives you
the chance to exploit the same firmware environment for non-linux OS'es.
-Justin
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