On 06/22/2012 01:02 AM, Duncan wrote:
> Richard Yao posted on Thu, 21 Jun 2012 05:33:22 -0400 as excerpted:
> 
>> A firmware replacement for the BIOS does not need to worry about floppy
>> drives, hard drives, optical drives, usb devices, isa devices, pci
>> devices and pci express drives, etcetera, because those live on buses,
>> which the kernel can detect.
> 
> But you have to be able to load the kernel first, before it can do all 
> that detection.  And to load it, you need to be able to read the device 
> it's located on, which in a modern x86 system (as contrasted with mips/
> arm) generally means detection of what's there, some mechanism to choose 
> which available devices to check for a kernel or boot loader or whatever, 
> and some way to dynamically configure it, since many devices are simply 
> (device info probable) bricks until configured, these days.
> 
> Sure, you can boot directly to a Linux kernel /as/ your firmware (as Ian 
> S suggested), but then you're back to hard-configuring it in ordered to 
> do so, thus losing all that extra flexibility that's part of what makes 
> x86 different.  Which was the question that I was addressing.
> 

Placing it in the firmware is what I suggested. I also later stated that
it is possible for the firmware to contain an initramfs that would
enable it to start a kernel located on a device.

It seems to me that this would work if device trees for motherboards
were readily available and the EEPROM chips have sufficient capacity. I
am under the impression that UEFI firmware is large enough that capacity
on UEFI motherboards should not be an issue. The main issue would be
obtaining device trees.