On 10/31/06, Richard Smith <smithbone@gmail.com> wrote:

Chris Ziomkowski wrote:

> Second, the mainboards all come with an 8 Mbit BIOS flash. Will this be
> enough to boot Linux directly? There is no IDE capability on these
> boards, so the only disk options are USB or SATA. I don't need video
> support. There will only be a serial console.

Missed this on the previous response. Yes 8Mbit will work fine. OLPC
was doing exactly that and we lose 128KiB to binary blobs.

I just shipped a K8 system (SUNW ultra40) to a user with a 1 MB flash -- in which we put a full kernel, initrd, SATA drives, ext3, etc. etc. plus busybox.

It's wonderful. Boots to ash in 10 seconds or less. And, unlke the proprietary BIOS, it can boot with only one CPU installed.

ron