Technorama

PCs these days all have a BIOS which launches the OS bootstrap from disc. If the disc fails this leaves us stuck scrabbling for bootable CDs/USB Sticks/Floppies to diagnose the problem.

There is a lot to be said for booting from Flash memory, it is safe, quick, and if the disc does fail (I've had nine hardiscs fail in my home PCs in the last ten years!) you're not stuck in a situation where you're unable to run diagnostic software from a compact version of the OS in ROM. Acorn (the UK's last independent desktop computer manufacture!) produced machines for UK and Australian schools which ran Risc OS. They took the approach of putting the whole OS in a 4 MB ROM! It was not flashable, so when a new version of Risc OS came out we needed to buy new chips! This was all back in the 1990s, Acorn sadly aren't around now, but the idea lives on with me today.

Now we don't need the whole OS in ROM (could a modern desktop OS even fit in 4 MB!?), but we could take one aspect of this idea and put essential components in a Flash memory, putting everything supplementary on harddisc as at present. This would give us the best of both worlds, as normal operation would be the same as at present, but if needed they could hold down a key during boot and get access to a wealth of diagnostic software built into their own computer.

So how about motherboards start shipping with a 16MB Flash? My Linux kernel is 1.5MB, and memtest is 86KB, so this leaves space for a ramdisc image with some other utils like fsck.ext3 and badblocks etc. Perhaps this could even be integrated with the LinuxBIOS project? A smart boot manager (GRUB etc), Master Boot Record (MBR) fixer would be *very* useful. Also, if full machine virtualisation takes off proper we'll see Hypervisors on the market, so there is scope for that being in Flash ROM as well ;)

Labels: Future