[OT] But important to me. Appropiate Mailing Lists ??

[William Case]

Hi Markku;

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

On Mon, 2006-17-04 at 11:48 +0300, Markku Kolkka wrote:
> William Case kirjoitti viestissään (lähetysaika maanantai, 17. huhtikuuta 2006 04:54):
> > To be more accurate about the BIOS question; one of the things
> > that has always bothered me -- and it may be a result of
> > stupidity -- is when I turn on my computer in a cold boot,
> > power first flows to the main BIOS (read Firmware Hub for
> > Intel) and then to the other auxiliary BIOSes.
> 
> No, all components are powered on at the same time. (large servers
> may use power sequencing to limit the maximum start-up current draw,
> but that's not relevant to BIOS start-up).
> See: http://www.pcguide.com/ref/mbsys/bios/boot.htm
> 
I'll double check, of course, but I seem to remember reading that one of
the first functions of main BIOS is to wake up/start the other BIOSes.
I have been to the pcguide bios site but I'll read it again.

> > How does main BIOS, at this early stage, know were the
> > auxiliary BIOSes are and which ones to elbow into action
> 
> They are at fixed addresses: video BIOS at 0xC000, other expansion
> cards between 0xC8000 and 0xF0000 at 2KiB boundaries. The main
> BIOS looks for a specific "magic number" at those addresses to see
> if there's an add-on BIOS chip.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIOS#Firmware_on_adapter_cards

Been to wikipedia bios but not to BIOS#Firmware_on_adapter_cards that I
can remember
> 
> > You know, to get a real answer I am probably going to have to
> > slog my way through the BASH source code.  Ruefully; I would
> > have thought that someone would have already done the slogging
> > and left a nice neat readable explanation for the world.
> 
> A UNIX/Linux shell is basically really simple: see this CS course
> assignment:
> http://www.math.grin.edu/~walker/courses/213.fa04/lab-shell.shtml
> 
> BASH adds various extra features like command history, filename
> completion etc. but the basic command interpreter works the same way:
> 
> For each command line,
> 	1. break the command line into tokens - the pieces separated
> 	   by spaces
>         2. place the command tokens into an array of command-line
> 	   strings
>         3. identify the location of the desired program by searching
> 	   the user's PATH variable for the given program
>         4. use fork to spawn a child process, and use execv
> 	   within the child process to actually run the desired program.
Makes sense.
> -- 
>  Markku Kolkka
>  markku.kolkka at iki.fi

All of your explanations and advice make good sense.

I will definitely check and read all those sites.

However, my original question stands.  Does anybody know of a friendly
site to appropriately pose those kind of questions and get quality
responses like the ones above?

Honestly, I don't mind doing the work, but sometimes the concept gets
past me, the search criteria are wrong or mis-posed or I would just like
to talk over some of the issues that have come up.  As you can see, they
are not all Fedora related although most of them are Linux questions.
(The BIOS questions above are an exception.)

Regards Bill