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. :)
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?
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.
d) Are any SMP motherboards supported?
Thanks for your time,
Justin C. Darby