On 4/28/07, Peter Stuge stuge-linuxbios@cdy.org wrote:
On Sat, Apr 28, 2007 at 03:11:19PM +0200, Quux wrote:
do you think that PCI expansion ROM may be useful during the developing phase in order to avoid soldering as on an GA M57sli mobo ?
Not an expansion ROM, that suggests the ROM is part of a PCI expansion card (sound card, networking card, graphics card, RAID card etc) but some southbridges support decoding the BIOS address range to the PCI bus. There has to be a jumper for this on the board in order to work.
I used to be a not very big fan of this idea, but my interest is growing given the unwillingness of some companies (*****) to help. This would allow us to grab control of the platform, although it is pretty late in the process, but we could add this card to nodes and force them to use linuxbiosmain and give us control over payload and some other parameters. It is not an ideal solution, but it is a transition path to full control. It would certainly be very helpful on a dell cluster we have at sandia, because the bios situation on that cluster is difficult to work with, to say the least.
So, are there proto cards out there with nothing but a flash part on them?
thanks
ron