The 6 month lifespan (approximately) of an off-the-shelf ... Will your company allocate resources in the future to keep up with LinuxBIOS ports for new boards or revs? It will be great if you do.
As most smaller companies, we need to distribute our resources carefully. Currently, the most advantageous way for us for this particular project (considering costs and time-to-market, among others) is to use off-the-shelf hardware. We do realize the implications of that choice.
If the platform is successful, the next "revision" of the product would use different components (motherboard and cpu, mainly), and yes, we would support LinuxBIOS in this case and do whatever is needed to get our chosen components to work with it. In fact, I came to this list with the idea of hiring someone to get LinuxBIOS to work for our chosen components (and I wrote about it in my first post), but hey, if someone wants to do it for free, that's even better ;)
We will be glad to donate back to the LinuxBIOS community if our product has the smallest success.
... passive cooling system...
Passively cooled CPU would be nice, but that's not a requirement per se right now. However, a passively cooled *motherboard* (northbridge/southbridge) is a strong plus.
... I just don't see this coming out of the box.
We have no problem in modifying the off-the-shelf hardware we chose, as long as the bill fits our cost requirements.
Thanks for your comments and input.
Simon Labrecque
-----Original Message----- From: Bari Ari [mailto:bari@onelabs.com] Sent: Thursday, November 30, 2006 4:10 PM To: Simon Labrecque Cc: 'Vlad C.'; linuxbios@linuxbios.org Subject: Re: [LinuxBIOS] Support for recent chipset and powerful desktop CPU
Simon Labrecque wrote:
Good point. While it would be quite easy to add FireWire support through a PCI card, it sure would be nice to have support for it native to the motherboard.
The problem with the MSI K9N is that the Northbridge's passive cooler is said to get very, VERY hot, which might be problematic in our application
as
noise (and therefore airflow) needs to be minimized.
I haven't tested it personally though, but every review I read on the K9N seems to mention the heat issue. That's why I liked the Abit board in the first place; passively cooled, but with heat pipes and an easy way out for the heat.
I guess we would need to test such a board in our "harsh" environment to know if it could survive there.
A few other points you may wish to consider are:
The 6 month lifespan (approximately) of an off-the-shelf. I'm not against LinuxBIOS (I've been lurking on the list since 1999) but the motherboard you pick today may be out of production by the time you go to market.
Will your company allocate resources in the future to keep up with LinuxBIOS ports for new boards or revs? It will be great if you do. Hopefully MSI will also get onboard with LinuxBIOS and support this from the factory.
Your issues with thermal management are a bit off topic on this list, but a 100% passively cooled AM2 designs are possible. We have done them. I've never seen an off-the-shelf mainboard come with an entirely passive cooling system for any cpu over a few (5-10) watts. You would however be able to develop a passive cooling system for the K9N that use the <35 W AM2 processors. I just don't see this coming out of the box.
-Bari