* popkonserve popkonserve@gmx.de [070828 20:59]:
Why trying to support bleeding edge hardware almost nobody has datasheets for instead of writing reliable custom drivers that would support older hardware.
It takes round about 6-8 weeks to port LinuxBIOS to a completely new system with new northbridge, southbridge, superio, mainboard.
This is a lot of time, and most ports that actually happen are done because there is some interest in using a large number of that hardware.
For hobbyist ports, you can boot a single machine a lot of times before those 5s you safe make up for the 6 weeks you have to put in before it works.
So most ports have been commercially used in some product, and nobody planning to use LinuxBIOS today in a product will plan to use hardware that you can not buy anymore (ie. a mainboard older than a year).
i'm willing to write more generic full featured drivers (northbridge/southbridge) for older chipsets (i posted a list and i'll stick to that list).
This is great!
my problem is not that i don't understand the hardware itself but the linuxbios framework. i don't want to spend hours of code surfing just to understand how and where certain code sniplets are called or how certain config files need to be written.
I want to invite you to help us work on v3 then. The framework got a lot simpler.
a documentation to the code is close to non-existant. while this might not be a problem to long-term developers it drives new ones away.
For understanding the code, this one has generally been pretty useful.
http://qa.linuxbios.org/docs/doxygen/
what i would like to see is: generic support for usb/cdrom boot,
FILO (soon grub2) should do this.
ide support in southbridges
..?
an onscreen menu (nothing fancy)
lbmenu!
and a far better documentation for users and developers.
I think the big problem here is that as soon as people understand the code they are too busy to document it ;) I want to give this request back. Please, if you have a specific question about the code, do document it. Ask it on the list and document the answer in a way that others don't have to ask again.
The mailing list contains 70% or more of our knowledge, the rest is stored in the Wiki.
And we really want to improve.
Stefan