Ron,
How about the support of Option rom execution for on board device? Some device vendors only provide option rom instead of datasheet.
Regards
Yinghai Lu
On Tue, 5 Aug 2003, YhLu wrote:
How about the support of Option rom execution for on board device? Some device vendors only provide option rom instead of datasheet.
That's on the list. We're going to need to support it. VGA comes first.
ron
YhLu YhLu@tyan.com writes:
Ron,
How about the support of Option rom execution for on board device? Some device vendors only provide option rom instead of datasheet.
There are a couple of sides of this. 1) Anyone who supports Linux on non-x86 generally has a reasonable Linux driver that does not need an option rom to set anything up. This includes most hardware raid vendors.
2) We have the ADLO code which emulates a classic BIOS interface and as it matures it should be usable for most of those kinds of issues.
3) If we are running Linux if we can't get programming information from the vendor so there is an open source driver we generally don't want to use the hardware. Which is why ADLO is not an especially high priority.
Eric
* Eric W. Biederman ebiederman@lnxi.com [030806 05:47]:
There are a couple of sides of this.
- Anyone who supports Linux on non-x86 generally has a reasonable Linux driver that does not need an option rom to set anything up. This includes most hardware raid vendors.
Still, this is not always enough. I cursed many times when the x86 emulation on Alpha machines was not capable of executing the hacks some vendors put in their option roms, which prevents video or booting from scsi from working.
- If we are running Linux if we can't get programming information from the vendor so there is an open source driver we generally don't want to use the hardware. Which is why ADLO is not an especially high priority.
This is also a matter of effort. I'd definitely prefer having the graphics hardware vendors write initialization firmware for their device than to do that myself for every vendor whose graphics card I happen to use. In clusters this would not matter. It's all the same hardware anyways, and no video is needed. But for many other applications it's really useful.
Stefan
On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, Stefan Reinauer wrote:
- Eric W. Biederman ebiederman@lnxi.com [030806 05:47]:
There are a couple of sides of this.
- Anyone who supports Linux on non-x86 generally has a reasonable Linux driver that does not need an option rom to set anything up. This includes most hardware raid vendors.
Still, this is not always enough. I cursed many times when the x86 emulation on Alpha machines was not capable of executing the hacks some vendors put in their option roms, which prevents video or booting from scsi from working.
yes, although I have always hoped it would be enough to count on open-source linux drivers, we still need expansion rom support today. There's a cluster at Argonne that needs an old-fashioned BIOS on the nodes that have a certain model RAID-SCSI controller. They want linuxbios, and we need to do expansion roms first.
ron
ron minnich rminnich@lanl.gov writes:
On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, Stefan Reinauer wrote:
- Eric W. Biederman ebiederman@lnxi.com [030806 05:47]:
There are a couple of sides of this.
- Anyone who supports Linux on non-x86 generally has a reasonable Linux driver that does not need an option rom to set anything up. This includes most hardware raid vendors.
Still, this is not always enough. I cursed many times when the x86 emulation on Alpha machines was not capable of executing the hacks some vendors put in their option roms, which prevents video or booting from scsi from working.
yes, although I have always hoped it would be enough to count on open-source linux drivers, we still need expansion rom support today. There's a cluster at Argonne that needs an old-fashioned BIOS on the nodes that have a certain model RAID-SCSI controller. They want linuxbios, and we need to do expansion roms first.
Which model RAID-SCSI controller? I have seen an amazing number that have worked. I am wondering if it is simply a misreport.
Eric
On 6 Aug 2003, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
Which model RAID-SCSI controller? I have seen an amazing number that have worked. I am wondering if it is simply a misreport.
not sure, talk to the folks at Argonne, it's a LNXI cluster.
ron
ron minnich rminnich@lanl.gov writes:
On 6 Aug 2003, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
Which model RAID-SCSI controller? I have seen an amazing number that have worked. I am wondering if it is simply a misreport.
not sure, talk to the folks at Argonne, it's a LNXI cluster
If it is the one I think it is LinuxBIOS was not ready for the board at the time the cluster shipped, so we did not put it on. It was not the RAID-SCSI, that we managed to test without the option ROM and that worked.
Eric
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ebiederman＠lnxi.com -
ron minnich -
Stefan Reinauer -
YhLu