Hi,
On Wed, Aug 30, 2006 at 12:11:14AM +0200, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
The FSF has a campaign (http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/free-bios.html) we could use for sampling which SuperIOs are used in commonly sold boards. Their "how can you help" section could state prominently that we need a list of boards with matching SuperIOs.
Suggested text follows: "The LinuxBIOS project needs your help to make LinuxBIOS work on your mainboard. A first important step is to know which SuperIO your mainboard uses. This information can be obtained easily following the directions on <some LinuxBIOS wiki page>. Once that is known, you can download a matching experimental BIOS image and test the code."
The LinuxBIOS wiki page could read as follows: "How to find the SuperIO on your mainboard? There are two ways to do it:
- Find the chip on the board (usually a bigger chip with ITE, NSC, SMSC, VIA or Winbond written on it). See <photo> and <photo> for reference.
- Find the chip with sensors-detect and look for something named SuperIO. See <sample output> for reference. Equipped with that information, you may also want to find out if that chip is really soldered on your board.
Please add this your findings to the wiki so others can verify and profit from it.
<example board> <example superio> <link to bios image> <example board> <example superio> <link to bios image>"
What do you think?
Asking for help in the FSF campaign is definately a good idea, as it reaches quite a lot of people, I guess.
I'm not sure whether a list of Super IOs is all that useful, though. We can simply support all of them (a coordinated effort shouldn't take more than a few weeks to support almost all Super IOs you can get a datasheet for).
I'm sure there are other areas where the project needs lots more help; Someone who is more involved with the project than I am should probably create a list of such areas.
IMHO these things are quite important:
1) publicity among non-coders to make the project well-known, and to make the fact known that there's a viable, working Free Software alternative to proprietary BIOSes.
2) Get as many coders as possible involved. Create incentive to try LinuxBIOS, which will result in active contributions in many cases. It's crucial to have support for a wide range of hardware, as only that will really ensure a wide-spread use of LinuxBIOS (I'm especially thinking about desktop machines here).
3) Create pressure on those companies which do not give out datasheets for various hardware parts. This is much easier if 1) is successful and many people/customers demand LinuxBIOS support.
HTH, Uwe.