Er, not so much

Er, not so much

Posted Dec 9, 2006 19:48 UTC (Sat) by danshearer (guest, #18686)
In reply to: Er, not so much by bos
Parent article: LinuxBIOS ready to go mainstream (Linux.com)

In terms of futures rather than the (fair enough) present you describe, see
http://linuxbios.org/pipermail/linuxbios/2006-September/0... .

Booting a BIOS in a full-system simulator is a great way to avoid bit-bashing, in fact a truly good
simulator not only implements the hardware sufficiently well that there is no functional
difference [1] but the debugging facilities are sufficently advanced that the development
environment is better than most visual IDEs for high level software development. Alas there is no
such OSS simulator, QEMU is the very credible best we have but once you've worked with Simics
[2] there's no going back..

--
Dan Shearer
dan@shearer.org

[1] absent bugs in both the simulator and the hardware which differ from the spec, and other
issues of this class. If hasn't booted on production silicon it doesn't work :-)

[2] from Virtutech, former employee here and it's as good as I'm claiming. Develop your BIOS in a
virtual world containing target, the server the target talks to, simulated network equipment and a
full range of peripherals for the target -- all to the same virtual clock and all reversible.

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