Hi there,
as coreboot gives us the possibility to fully control a board's boot process, I would like to suggest to make a small end-user project. As I do want to build some web and application servers using xen. I think about joining forces and build a reference-implementation for that. So anyone then can buy a quite cheap an available mainboard, that supports coreboot and a XEN-Kernel with some small userland (sshd, mgetty (modem-access), busybox, xen-tools). The reason for this is that people can build cheap servers to put them into colocation without the need of expensive remote-console-interfaces or remote-hands service and the like. The Server just boots coreboot and then the xen-kernel with the essential tools. So if anything goes wrong (Misconfigured Xen-clients, hdd-failures, Network, other pain which does not affect cpu+chipset) the box will be able to be put to life again from remote. Within coreboot, using a 8MByte Bios we should have enough space for the userland.
Now the question is, which board/chipset would you choose? There some serverboards supported in coreboot which are now end-of life, and there are consumerboards which may be good for the task. As I think, that this xen-server sould be a 1u (max 2u) server, a small board with low peripheral count (4x sata for kernel-raid5), 2 PCI-express-slots for extensions, chipset-graphics, internal serial port for modem etc. should suffice.
Any suggestions/ideas?
Thanks for reading all the best
LuJa