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SubjectRe: Linuxbios
Well I'm the guy running the project right now. We are currently using the
OpenBIOS mailing list to carry our traffic (see
http://www.freiburg.linux.de/OpenBIOS/) since there is so much we have in
common. Our main concerns are currently restricted to cluster
applications. The current way most people manage cluster nodes involves
using DOS boot and VGA for configuration tasks and using the serial ports
for control and status. Using BIOS and DOS to manage 1000-node clusters is
simply not practical. Using 9600-baud serial ports when there's a 100-mbit
connection available is disgusting. We want to get away from this
silliness.

(For a context on the cluster work you can see www.acl.lanl.gov/~rminnich)

One vendor has just volunteered to give us all the info we need, up to and
including source code for their bios and mainboards. So we now have one
vendor on our side, although a few other vendors are in the wings.

Our code structure is that we have just enough code to allow us to get the
machine barely up and into 32-bit mode, gunzip linux to nvram, and jump to
it. Linux is being asked to do the rest :-) So, for example, we use
PCI_DIRECT mode only for PCI configuration since there is no PCI BIOS. The
VISWS support leads us to hope that we can boot SMP without the SMP BIOS.
ACPI is a very wide open question at this point, although just leaving
ACPI off is a perfectly good option for cluster nodes. I am not that happy
with the ACPI spec anyway.

We need help in a number of areas:

First off, we are going to switch to the STPC BIOS, as it is more suited
to our purposes (mostly C code, and it switches to 32-bit mode very early
on). Some assistance in getting STPC running on a common motherboard (such
as the L440gx+ :-)) would help.

Our SDRAM sizing and init code is not very good; we could use good code.
The code we've been offered so far requires memory to work (oops!);
requires a stack (oops!); or assumes a totally configured machine (oops!).

VGA initialization is an open question. Can you do it without the VGA bios
or not? Note that we don't care for most cases; on a cluster, you manage
from the serial port (less desirable), or from the network (most
desirable). But for some cases even having one card we knew we could drive
would be nice.

Motherboards: we've focused right now on the L440GX+, since we currently
have 128 of them in racks, and may get more. We would like to broaden our
scope.

If you would like to help, we would enjoy talking to you.

Thanks
ron


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