On Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 04:18:41PM +0000, Mark Rogers wrote:
Jonathan McDowell wrote:
We've submitted patches or reported bugs and helped track them down for numerous projects (Apache, the Linux kernel, Quagga, l2tpns and LinuxBIOS at least).
Interesting to see LinuxBIOS mentioned, as this is something I've wanted to play with for ages but never found a correctly shaped tuit.
What's it like?
In what way? I started looking at it as I want to build machines with serial consoles that will live in a datacentre and never have a keyboard/monitor plugged into them. Oh, and allow network booting.
I ended up with an image that did serial console from the very beginning of boot and would then launch etherboot allowing me to boot from the network or it would time out waiting for a keypress after 5s and boot a kernel from disk. It boots a lot faster than a conventional BIOS (which is what interests a lot of people in it) and it gives you a lot more control (which is what interests me).
What sensibly do I need to get started with it? I did buy a support mobo at one point (no idea what happened to it, its probably in a customers machine somewhere) but that's as far as I got.
If you have a supported motherboard then you can cross your fingers and try to build and flash an image. However if it goes wrong you're a bit stuffed. I've ended up with an EEPROM programmer and a lovely device called a BIOS Saviour (see http://www.ioss.com.tw/web/English/RD1BIOSSavior.html) that lets you have 2 BIOS chips installed and switch between them easily - you keep one as the original working BIOS and then flash your new code to the other chip to try out. I was working on a barely supported board however. Datasheets are also vital, but frequently the decent stuff is only available under an NDA. :(
J.