On Tue, Aug 28, 2007 at 08:17:45PM +0200, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
On 28.08.2007 19:38, Uwe Hermann wrote:
On Tue, Aug 28, 2007 at 12:48:06AM +0200, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
created. So I carefully wonder what the real goal of such a call would be, except gathering random people with random boards? Something like: We have 10 people who are willing to work on this or that mainboard if you get them a system they can keep for doing the work, given that the
Would it be possible to create sort of a pseudo-port which only ensures working RAM, serial and flashing? Such a pseudo-port would leave people
No, "working RAM" is already 95% of the work in most cases.
If that were the case, we'd have dozens of recent boards supported.
OK, if you talk about boards where northbridge+southbridge is already supported it's less work, yes (still not trivial, though).
Think of all the MCP55 boards. RAM works. North- and southbridge are supported. The "little things" are what keep us from supporting them completely. A generic MCP55 port which loads the payload (additional board init etc.) over serial can be the ideal starting point.
Why? I don't really see a use for this. If someone is able to run such a payload, build LinuxBIOS, test patches etc. it's not much additional work to just add proper support for the board in the first place. No need for such a "test-payload", I think.
Yes, a couple more MCP55 and CK804 boards would be nice; I'm working on A8NE-FM/S (I already sent a preliminary patch a few weeks ago), and the K9N Neo is a good candidate, too (which I have here, just lack some spare time to work on it).
Maybe publish an article on lwn/slashdot/whatever about flashrom? You'd have to make sure people merge MAC addresses and other stuff from the old into the new image, though, otherwise we'll have a load of boards with the same MAC address and quite a few of them may have 00:00:00:00:00:00, resulting in malfunction of some switches, network stacks etc.
Can you elaborate? Where is the MAC address stored? On which boards? I doubt that all boards out there do this. What happens if you download a BIOS image from $VENDOR website? Does the flasher contain special code to deal with the MAC address?
People want to flash their proprietary BIOS under Linux now, without having to reboot. They benefit from flashrom support for their system as much as we do. Giving people a working tool for something that is really complicated right now could even make them interested in LinuxBIOS. After all, they would have to visit our website to get flashrom.
Full ack. How can we advertise flashrom some more?
Article in widely read publication. I'll contact lwn.net and report back.
Great, thanks!
Uwe.