It's common knowledge that Linux is often better for hardware testing
than Microsoft's pitiful ACT software. Intel and other companies have
discovered hardware flaws that Linux exposes which all the Windows
(and ACT) testing does not. (see early P4's...) Similarly, most
BIOS out there work wonderfully with Windows but often have quirks
with Linux. An overall policy of BIOS independence minimizes if not
eliminates the chances of such quirks affecting Linux users.
Getting a vendor to fix a broken BIOS is like trying to get a reluctant
cow out of the barn: oftimes is just doesn't happen, especially if
it is a Linux-only problem. Toshiba laptops have had broken ACPI
tables for ages, but I have yet to see any BIOS updates regardless
of the number of reports sent to Toshiba.
Now, that said, in x86 land, we actually -do- allow the BIOS to
setup the PCI bus for us, and for the most part, we leave that setup
completely alone. grep for 'pcibios_assign_all_busses'... and note
it is defined to zero for x86, and 1 for alpha.
Finally, minimizing BIOS dependencies is also important for applications
like linuxbios -- an embedded firmware that initializes the CPU and
DRAM, and then passes control to a Linux kernel to do the rest.
Regards,
Jeff
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