Messages in this thread | | | From | "Helge Hafting" <> | Date | Fri, 23 Oct 1998 09:36:46 +0100 | Subject | Re: Motherboard design specifically for Linux |
| |
On Mon, Oct 19, 1998 at 07:46:53AM -0500, Terry L Ridder wrote:
> I am interested in hearing what features people would > want to have on a motherboard/mainboard designed from the > ground up specifically for Linux. > 1. OpenFirm Ware. > 2. Geek port similar to the BeBox. > 3. Common Hardware Reference Platform Compliant (CHRP)
A board the way I want it:
A big flash rom for the kernel, and a smaller one for the bios. Both flashes have flash programming code so one may be used for programming the other. Have the chips in sockets so those who really screw up can take them out and have them reprogrammed elsewhere.
Put every chip in sockets so anything can be replaced easily. This is good for repairs when some experimental card goes wrong and short cirquits a bus.
Make the board as a kit, where you buy the board with sockets and connectors only. Everything else is *optional*, such as the ISA/PCI bus driver chips, on-board ide/scsi/io-ports, cache memory and so on. I should be able to buy what I want and not much more. And replace anything that breaks or turns out to be buggy. Production cost would hopefully not be too high for a card with sockets only and the chips in a bag. :-)
Make a card with lots of potential but the ability to go cheap too. Those who "fully populate" their card should be able to fit several cpu's, fill their address space with RAM, connect lots of cache, utilize several 64-bit PCI buses, and connect some extra flash ROM's for custom purposes.
Those who go cheap may want to fit a single cpu and bus drivers for only one pci bus.
Those who build a beowulf may want to fit support for processors, ram and ethernet only. No need for a keyboard controller or any kind of disk access.
An optional section for general-purpose i/o would be nice too. This should include room for some A/D D/A chips, timers, shift registers, memory access hardware for offloading the cpu, and several digital i/o lines. Connections between these items should be programmable (maybe a PGA or something?) so that many kinds of parallell, serial or analog interfaces can be implemented. Lots of fun for hardware hackers, and others may use the A/D D/A stuff for recording/playing sound.
If the board is designed for linux, worry too much about "dos compatibility." I.e. no need for implementing the 640k barrier in hardware. The bios memory test should definitely not make an artifical distinction between "base" and "extended" memory. There should be "memory" only. No special "shadow ram" either, this can be done in software using page tables for those that really want it.
Helge Hafting
- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |