Am 04.10.2010 07:33, schrieb Warren Turkal:
How do I show booting Windows 7 for a board I am working on? If I can't because I don't have a license for Windows, should I not be able to get the coreboot certification?
That's the difference between a certification that's useful for vendors and one that's useful for computing enthusiasts.
Whoever produces and sells boards will have some Windows 7 license (and probably the dev builds to improve testing, as well as the Microsoft test kits) lying around.
That means, certification would be for different purposes.. a "coreboot + Linux" certificate would state that the board is actually useful beyond freedos (eg. networking works, HPET is around, ACPI is at least somewhat useful, even if Linux's ACPI interpreter is more forgiving than perl)
A "coreboot + Windows" certificate could build onto that, stating that Windows operation was tested, too. Stacking them this way would ensure that Windows support doesn't break Linux (or any other free OS).
But vendors will (except for some specialty shops or special customer requests) require the latter - with no regard for the former, except maybe to assess how much work they'd have to put in/sponsor to make a coreboot port Windows compatible.
As a side note on "Windows compatible", I'm not 100% sure on this, but I think the "Designed for Windows" set of certificates by Microsoft handle firmware behaviour, too.
Patrick