On 28.08.2007 19:38, Uwe Hermann wrote:
On Tue, Aug 28, 2007 at 12:48:06AM +0200, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
created. So I carefully wonder what the real goal of such a call would be, except gathering random people with random boards? Something like: We have 10 people who are willing to work on this or that mainboard if you get them a system they can keep for doing the work, given that the
Would it be possible to create sort of a pseudo-port which only ensures working RAM, serial and flashing? Such a pseudo-port would leave people
No, "working RAM" is already 95% of the work in most cases.
If that were the case, we'd have dozens of recent boards supported. Think of all the MCP55 boards. RAM works. North- and southbridge are supported. The "little things" are what keep us from supporting them completely. A generic MCP55 port which loads the payload (additional board init etc.) over serial can be the ideal starting point.
Maybe a call for action for tools only? Flashrom and probe_superio support are necessary requirements for easy porting. And if our tools get used for stuff besides LinuxBIOS (maybe in the lm-sensors project or somewhere else), they get wider testing coverage and maybe even outside contributors. I see this chance especially for flashrom.
Yes, I agree on that. We should really get more people to use flashrom, not only as cheap advertising for LinuxBIOS but also because it really _is_ a lot better than all those crappy "use DOS boot disk" or "create CDROM with DOS *.exe flasher on it" solutions people keep recommending all the time.
I've written up a short article on that already, see http://www.hermann-uwe.de/blog/flashing-a-bios-the-linux-way-tm-using-flashr...
(and I think the "flashrom on about 140 computers" was a direct result of that post)
http://www.linuxbios.org/pipermail/linuxbios/2007-July/023046.html
Maybe publish an article on lwn/slashdot/whatever about flashrom? You'd have to make sure people merge MAC addresses and other stuff from the old into the new image, though, otherwise we'll have a load of boards with the same MAC address and quite a few of them may have 00:00:00:00:00:00, resulting in malfunction of some switches, network stacks etc.
People want to flash their proprietary BIOS under Linux now, without having to reboot. They benefit from flashrom support for their system as much as we do. Giving people a working tool for something that is really complicated right now could even make them interested in LinuxBIOS. After all, they would have to visit our website to get flashrom.
Full ack. How can we advertise flashrom some more?
Article in widely read publication. I'll contact lwn.net and report back.
Regards, Carl-Daniel