"Justin C. Darby" jdarby@powercom.net writes:
I'm trying to get together funding for a research project at my company to build a generic platform for high availability devices using Linux, LinuxBIOS, etc, as the software portion.
I had some general questions about LinuxBIOS I wanted to ask while I'm still collecting information to report in my project plan.
a) I have a requirement of a 4+ PCI slots, compact flash booting via IDE, and a serial console. Video, sound, etc, are pointless for any project we will take on. Onboard network ports are nice. What hardware works best? I don't care about AMD vs. Intel, I want to know what (hopefully easily available) motherboards are best served by LinuxBIOS in general. If this is going to start a flame war, I don't mind personal responses to this question. :)
We have at least one board with 6 slots and 4 PCI-X busses...
b) Are there any known problems running any types of PCI cards? High speed serial, ethernet, whatever, or if it works with Linux, it should work just fine?
Only video.... And that is just initialization glitches.
c) Can Disk-on-Chip BIOS solutions be reflashed several times? I would like these machines to be remotely upgradeable in all aspects while having a local device to boot from.
All recent BIOS solutions can reflashed several times.
d) Are any SMP motherboards supported?
yes.
Eric