On 04/27/2017 12:30 AM, Patrick 'P. J.' McDermott wrote:
On 2017-04-26 at 15:25, Rene Shuster wrote:
Maybe even FSF-endorsed. Great news! Spread the news.
The H8SCM is a nice find, but unfortunately probably not eligible for FSF certification.
The board has an old AGP-based Matrox G200eW GPU. In addition to having a non-free VBIOS [1], the GPU has a "WARP Engine" – a RISC coprocessor core with non-free microcode (loaded by Linux [2]) to do triangle setup operations [3].
So, a couple of blobs that would be rather non-trivial to reverse engineer and replace. The board could surely run headless without them, but the FSF most likely wouldn't certify it since users could be tempted to load the blobs to get video output and graphics acceleration.
Yeah. AGP? I had thought it was PCI behind a PCI-e>PCI bridge
What could be nice is replacing the crappy matrox chip with another better one that is compatible, does anyone know if that is possible? is it a standard bga or what not?
The only issues with the board I have seen is the lack of PCI-e lanes on the SR5650, but for $30 you really can't go wrong. Configs: x16 and x4, x16 and x8 physical. x8, x8 and x4 - x16, x8 and x8 physical.
When I get the cash I will get one of the latest and greatest 2014 G34 boards from supermicro and see about porting that as they have a dual northbridge layout there is plenty of PCI-e lanes, for instance the H8QG7-iLN4F is the best G34 board.