Note: I'd normally use the linuxbios.org web page submission form, but the form is not working, and there is no contact info that looked readily available. The list isn't a bad place to find people willing to work on new hardware, so here goes...
I found some cheap motherboards from Amptron that make an ideal terminal server or low-power workstation. It's the PIII-3787CLM+. You might recognize the motherboard if you bought one of those $199 Fry's/Walmart PCs recently. The motherboard + 733MHz Via C3 costs about $70 retail. It comes with just about everything you need for a desktop: AGP Video, AC97 sound, 10/100 Ethernet, and USB. All I need to do is add a floppy drive, some RAM, and then boot.
Motherboard specs: http://www.amptron.com/html/MotherboardP3_M787CL+_frame.html
I plan to use the motherboard on desktops (LTSP and/or diskless NFS-based RedHat 8.0) and some servers (add more RAM and maybe a a uDMA drive or two).
I'd really like to just boot Linux off the BIOS to make boot times faster and have one less moving part to fail. If the BIOS supported USB boot drives, I'd just get a keychain drive and be done. The built-in Ethernet doesn't PXEboot, so LinuxBIOS looks like the only way to get rid of the floppy.
I'd be glad to donate a montherboard ($70 retail value each) to anyone who can get one of them to boot to become either a LTSP client or a diskless Linux workstation (initrd root + NFS /usr) without the use of a floppy disk. I'll throw in a $20 256MB DIMM for fun.
The label on the BIOS chip reads: "686 AMIBIOS (C)1999 BS46". The Amptron web page states it's 2MB "Flash". I don't know how this compares to DiskOnChip, but it's my preference not to have to buy/install DOC if I can avoid it. Reading the Sis630 LinuxBIOS HOWTO, I don't feel confident in my ability to get it to work on new unsupported hardware.
If you think you can get it to work, drop me a line. If you can make a public HOWTO document for me and others to install LinuxBIOS on the board (without buying DiskOnChip), you can keep your parts. If it's not possible, let me know.
I really like the hardware becasue it's an excellent, low-power (25W), cheap desktop platform. It could also be a part of dense low-bandwidth low-power server clusters.
Eric Ziegast San Diego, CA ziegast@vix.com 619-994-UNIX (cell)
Some info off a system on which I installed RedHat 8.0...
# lspci 00:00.0 Host bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 630 Host (rev 21) 00:00.1 IDE interface: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 5513 [IDE] (rev d0) 00:01.0 ISA bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 85C503/5513 00:01.1 Ethernet controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS900 10/100 Ethernet (rev 83) 00:01.2 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 7001 (rev 07) 00:01.3 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 7001 (rev 07) 00:02.0 PCI bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 5591/5592 AGP 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS630 GUI Accelerator+3D (rev 21)
# dmesg Linux version 2.4.18-14 (bhcompile@stripples.devel.redhat.com) (gcc version 3.2 20020903 (Red Hat Linux 8.0 3.2-7)) #1 Wed Sep 4 11:57:57 EDT 2002 BIOS-provided physical RAM map: BIOS-e820: 0000000000000000 - 000000000009fc00 (usable) BIOS-e820: 000000000009fc00 - 00000000000a0000 (reserved) BIOS-e820: 00000000000f0000 - 0000000000100000 (reserved) BIOS-e820: 0000000000100000 - 000000000fdf0000 (usable) BIOS-e820: 000000000fdf0000 - 000000000fdf8000 (ACPI data) BIOS-e820: 000000000fdf8000 - 000000000fe00000 (ACPI NVS) BIOS-e820: 00000000ffef0000 - 00000000fff00000 (reserved) BIOS-e820: 00000000ffff0000 - 0000000100000000 (reserved) 253MB LOWMEM available. On node 0 totalpages: 65008 zone(0): 4096 pages. zone(1): 60912 pages. zone(2): 0 pages. Kernel command line: ro root=LABEL=/ Initializing CPU#0 Detected 735.006 MHz processor. Speakup v-1.00 CVS: Tue Jun 11 14:22:53 EDT 2002 : initialized Console: colour VGA+ 80x25 Calibrating delay loop... 1468.00 BogoMIPS Memory: 251216k/260032k available (1193k kernel code, 6400k reserved, 984k data, 200k init, 0k highmem) Checking if this processor honours the WP bit even in supervisor mode... Ok. Dentry cache hash table entries: 32768 (order: 6, 262144 bytes) Inode cache hash table entries: 16384 (order: 5, 131072 bytes) Mount cache hash table entries: 4096 (order: 3, 32768 bytes) ramfs: mounted with options: <defaults> ramfs: max_pages=31655 max_file_pages=0 max_inodes=0 max_dentries=31655 Buffer cache hash table entries: 16384 (order: 4, 65536 bytes) Page-cache hash table entries: 65536 (order: 6, 262144 bytes) CPU: Before vendor init, caps: 00803035 80803035 00000000, vendor = 5 CPU: L1 I Cache: 64K (32 bytes/line), D cache 64K (32 bytes/line) CPU: L2 Cache: 64K (32 bytes/line) CPU: After vendor init, caps: 00803135 80803035 00000000 00000000 CPU: After generic, caps: 00803135 80803035 00000000 00000000 CPU: Common caps: 00803135 80803035 00000000 00000000 CPU: Centaur VIA Samuel 2 stepping 03 Checking 'hlt' instruction... OK. POSIX conformance testing by UNIFIX mtrr: v1.40 (20010327) Richard Gooch (rgooch@atnf.csiro.au) mtrr: detected mtrr type: Intel PCI: PCI BIOS revision 2.10 entry at 0xfd9f8, last bus=1 PCI: Using configuration type 1 PCI: Probing PCI hardware PCI: Using IRQ router SIS [1039/0008] at 00:01.0 isapnp: Scanning for PnP cards... isapnp: No Plug & Play device found speakup: initialized device: /dev/synth, node (MAJOR 10, MINOR 25) Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.4 Based upon Swansea University Computer Society NET3.039 Initializing RT netlink socket apm: BIOS version 1.2 Flags 0x03 (Driver version 1.16) Starting kswapd VFS: Diskquotas version dquot_6.5.0 initialized pty: 512 Unix98 ptys configured Serial driver version 5.05c (2001-07-08) with MANY_PORTS MULTIPORT SHARE_IRQ SERIAL_PCI ISAPNP enabled ttyS0 at 0x03f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A Real Time Clock Driver v1.10e block: 480 slots per queue, batch=120 Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 6.31 ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx SIS5513: IDE controller on PCI bus 00 dev 01 PCI: No IRQ known for interrupt pin A of device 00:00.1. Please try using pci=biosirq. SIS5513: chipset revision 208 SIS5513: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later SiS630 ATA 66 controller ide0: BM-DMA at 0xffa0-0xffa7, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:DMA ide1: BM-DMA at 0xffa8-0xffaf, BIOS settings: hdc:DMA, hdd:DMA hda: WDC WD200BB-60DGA0, ATA DISK drive ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14 hda: 39102336 sectors (20020 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=2434/255/63, UDMA(66) ide-floppy driver 0.99.newide Partition check: hda: hda1 hda2 hda3 floppy0: no floppy controllers found NET4: Frame Diverter 0.46 RAMDISK driver initialized: 16 RAM disks of 4096K size 1024 blocksize ide-floppy driver 0.99.newide md: md driver 0.90.0 MAX_MD_DEVS=256, MD_SB_DISKS=27 md: Autodetecting RAID arrays. md: autorun ... md: ... autorun DONE. NET4: Linux TCP/IP 1.0 for NET4.0 IP Protocols: ICMP, UDP, TCP, IGMP IP: routing cache hash table of 2048 buckets, 16Kbytes TCP: Hash tables configured (established 16384 bind 32768) Linux IP multicast router 0.06 plus PIM-SM NET4: Unix domain sockets 1.0/SMP for Linux NET4.0. RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0 Freeing initrd memory: 127k freed VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem). Journalled Block Device driver loaded kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Freeing unused kernel memory: 200k freed usb.c: registered new driver usbdevfs usb.c: registered new driver hub PCI: Found IRQ 10 for device 00:01.3 PCI: Sharing IRQ 10 with 00:01.2 usb-ohci.c: USB OHCI at membase 0xd0844000, IRQ 10 usb-ohci.c: usb-00:01.3, Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 7001 (#2) usb.c: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 1 hub.c: USB hub found hub.c: 2 ports detected PCI: Found IRQ 10 for device 00:01.2 PCI: Sharing IRQ 10 with 00:01.3 usb-ohci.c: USB OHCI at membase 0xd0846000, IRQ 10 usb-ohci.c: usb-00:01.2, Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 7001 usb.c: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 2 hub.c: USB hub found hub.c: 3 ports detected usb.c: registered new driver hiddev usb.c: registered new driver hid hid-core.c: v1.8.1 Andreas Gal, Vojtech Pavlik vojtech@suse.cz hid-core.c: USB HID support drivers mice: PS/2 mouse device common for all mice EXT3 FS 2.4-0.9.18, 14 May 2002 on ide0(3,2), internal journal Adding Swap: 522104k swap-space (priority -1) kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds EXT3 FS 2.4-0.9.18, 14 May 2002 on ide0(3,1), internal journal EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. ohci1394: pci_module_init failed ip_tables: (C) 2000-2002 Netfilter core team sis900.c: v1.08.04 4/25/2002 PCI: Found IRQ 11 for device 00:01.1 divert: allocating divert_blk for eth0 eth0: SiS 900 Internal MII PHY transceiver found at address 1. eth0: Using transceiver found at address 1 as default eth0: SiS 900 PCI Fast Ethernet at 0xde00, IRQ 11, 00:07:95:35:88:b1. eth0: Media Link On 100mbps half-duplex