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
