LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Benjamin Close <linux@senet.com.au>
  To  : Phil Pittard <vk5ham@seol.net.au>
  Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 10:25:21 +1030 (CST)

Re: RTC/BATTERY on Pentium M/B

On Thu, 13 Jan 2000, Phil Pittard wrote:

<SNIP>
> Try it sometime - add a hdd (jumpered for slave or 2ndary whatever of
> course) - make sure AUTO is OFF for that drive in the bios, so it wont
> be seen... then boot up linux... you will see it detected (use dmesg if
> it whizzes past to fast;)) You can even fdisk  it, mount it etc etc.

Linux is able to do this as it ignores bios and looks for everthing
itself. At one point it did use bios but there were just so many buggy
bioses the kernel dudes decided that they would do the work themselves.

Someone once asked if they could flash a Linux kernel into the bios chip -
since it does most of what bios does. The responce was no. Although linux
basically doubles as a bios, only bios knows how to setup the memory
timings for the board. I expect the kernel will probaly do this in the not
too distant future as well :)

Cheers,
 --

* Benjamin Close
* Benjsc@senet.com.au
* Web Page: http://users.senet.com.au/~benjsc