Karrot_Kream

Does anyone have any recs to learn about what goes into a basic BIOS? The TinyBIOS source is super easy to read but I'm looking more for something like xv6 which is both fun to read and also pedagogic (a tall order I'm asking for free, I know ;)

hakfoo
There are at least three "real" 8086 BIOSes-- "real" as in they can work on actual hardware rather than just emulators-- available in source form, which might be worth examining.

https://www.phatcode.net/downloads.php?id=101 -- this is a respin of code that apparently originated in the 1980s in sketchy Taiwanese clones, so I think some of the docs are reverse engineered

http://glabios.org/ is an all-new-still-under-development project, but it works well enough for my hobby usage.

https://github.com/skiselev/8088_bios These are more targeted towards some specific hardware projects (Xi8088/Micro8088)

Obviously, being for a simple 8086 mrans they don't have some of the complex chipset config used in a modern PC, and even stuff like "hard disc support" is outsourced (for that, you might consider stuff like the XT-IDE Universal BIOS)