On Sun, Oct 29, 2006 at 05:41:17PM +0700, Chris Ziomkowski wrote:
The G965 is not listed as supported, and I've been unable to find any comforting comments in the list archives. I am an accomplished embedded systems programmer, but my time is stretched very thin on this project. Do you guys believe I will be able to make this work without heroic efforts?
I guess it depends on whether you can get the chipset up fast enough. It's a 400 page datasheet, some would definately say that implementing code for that in very short time is heroic, but you may be more used to it, and manage well. :)
Second, the mainboards all come with an 8 Mbit BIOS flash. Will this be enough to boot Linux directly?
Likely yes, but it depends on how many things you must have compiled into the initial kernel. Try compiling a kernel as you like it and look at the size of arch/i386/boot/bzImage, or use LZMA to compress vmlinux. It should be max 1Mb-32kb. You may want to investigate linux-tiny as well.
boards, so the only disk options are USB or SATA. I don't need video support. There will only be a serial console.
Good, you save the space for the VGA BIOS in the flash then, and don't neccessarily have to implement support for the graphics stuff in the 965.
Assuming I can boot direct to Linux from the BIOS, would SATA or USB be more appropriate for loading the rest of the system?
I think SATA would be faster, simply because USB means at least one more layer of code between physical disk and filesystem driver.
Any comments would be appreciated. Am I getting in over my head?
Hard to say, it depends on your skill really. But it IS a tight timeline.
Do you think linuxbios is stable enough to consider for a commercial product?
I think LinuxBIOS is more stable than any commercial BIOS, and that's just one of it's advantages. :)
//Peter