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Hi Luis,
On 5/14/07, Luis Correia luis.f.correia@gmail.com wrote:
Hi!
On 5/14/07, shirish shirishag75@gmail.com wrote:
Hi all, Are there routers which are using linuxbios? I looked at the products page as well as vendors lists & went to the sites but failed to find anything.
Since there are no x86 compatible routers, your question does not make much sense. These routers you refer are usually embedded devices, mainly mips or arm based, where the bootloader does all needed board initialization.
First of all thank you for answering to my query. I'm still slightly confused. As per Linuxbios wiki page says it is to be used also in embedded devices. I have been reading the wikipedia pages on the the Linksys WRT54G series http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_WRT54G_series as well as OpenWRT http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWrt . Is something like that possible in the near or far future? Also what do u mean by no x86 compatible routers? Can u direct me to some layman literature or something which does tell me exactly which types of routers linuxbios supports now and will support in the near future.
In case, there is an device like that would it be possible say to use such a device & send diagnostic messages using telnet or something to see how its holding? or ask what functionality it has in some manner & it replies? I'm hoping that both the answers are in the positive. If so, are there specific vendors which are selling this in consumer devices. For e.g. I have the D-Link 502-T which has a busybox (0.6.1 pre) which uses ash. Although I'm not much of a geek but have been able to move around a bit & see that's its pretty similar to how linux is . For e.g. http://pastebin.ca/487045 is the output from the ifconfig of the router I have. Looking forward for suggestions, comments, flames to the same. -- Shirish Agarwal This email is licensed under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
Nevertheless, most of them run Linux or VxWorks based operating systems.
Hope I could help :) Luis Correia
- -- Shirish Agarwal This email is licensed under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
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On Tue, May 15, 2007 at 02:58:44AM +0530, shirish wrote:
Are there routers which are using linuxbios? I looked at theproducts page as well as vendors lists & went to the sites but failed to find anything.
Since there are no x86 compatible routers, your question does not make much sense.
Well, actually the question is not that silly. The machines Soekris Engineering (http://soekris.com) makes are Geode-based, and hence x86 compatible. Lots of people use them as routers.
They run their own (proprietary) bios.
Thanks, Ward.
On Tue, 2007-05-15 at 02:58 +0530, shirish wrote:
First of all thank you for answering to my query.I'm still slightly confused. As per Linuxbios wiki page says it is to be used also in embedded devices. I have been reading the wikipedia pages on the the Linksys WRT54G series http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_WRT54G_series as well as OpenWRT http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWrt . Is something like that possible in the near or far future? Also what do u mean by no x86 compatible routers? Can u direct me to some layman literature or something which does tell me exactly which types of routers linuxbios supports now and will support in the near future.
I have a WRT54G here. If I'm not mistaken, the Linksys Router box uses a MIPS processor.
From my understanding, it takes very little to bring up the Linksys
WRT54G?
Also, maybe embedded, meaning the EPIA motherboards?
-- Roger http://www.eskimo.com/~roger/index.html Key fingerprint = 8977 A252 2623 F567 70CD 1261 640F C963 1005 1D61
Mon May 14 14:51:08 PDT 2007
On Mon, May 14, 2007 at 02:55:50PM -0700, roger wrote:
First of all thank you for answering to my query.I'm still slightly confused. As per Linuxbios wiki page says it is to be used also in embedded devices. I have been reading the wikipedia pages on the the Linksys WRT54G series http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_WRT54G_series as well as OpenWRT http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWrt . Is something like that possible in the near or far future? Also what do u mean by no x86 compatible routers? Can u direct me to some layman literature or something which does tell me exactly which types of routers linuxbios supports now and will support in the near future.
I have a WRT54G here. If I'm not mistaken, the Linksys Router box uses a MIPS processor.
Routers seem to be using all kinds of systems, MIPS, PowerPC, ARM, x86 (not very often), maybe more...
From my understanding, it takes very little to bring up the Linksys
WRT54G?
Have a look at OpenWRT, DDWRT, FreeWRT, etc. (free firmware for lots of these types of routers).
Sure, it would be nice if someone would add support for ARM, MIPS, etc. to LinuxBIOS, but currently we don't support those architectures.
For routers where there's OpenWRT support it's not that pressing to have support, either (IMO). But it would sure be interesting to support "high-end" embedded MIPS, ARM, PowerPC stuff...
Any volunteers? :-)
Also, maybe embedded, meaning the EPIA motherboards?
Yes, that too. Different people call different things "embedded" ;-)
Via Epia and Geode systems are popular examples for what I would call "high-end" embedded systems.
Uwe.
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Hi,
On 5/15/07, Uwe Hermann uwe@hermann-uwe.de wrote:
On Mon, May 14, 2007 at 02:55:50PM -0700, roger wrote:
First of all thank you for answering to my query.I'm still slightly confused. As per Linuxbios wiki page says it is to be used also in embedded devices. I have been reading the wikipedia pages on the the Linksys WRT54G series http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_WRT54G_series as well as OpenWRT http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWrt . Is something like that possible in the near or far future? Also what do u mean by no x86 compatible routers? Can u direct me to some layman literature or something which does tell me exactly which types of routers linuxbios supports now and will support in the near future.
I have a WRT54G here. If I'm not mistaken, the Linksys Router box uses a MIPS processor.
Routers seem to be using all kinds of systems, MIPS, PowerPC, ARM, x86 (not very often), maybe more...
From my understanding, it takes very little to bring up the Linksys
WRT54G?
Have a look at OpenWRT, DDWRT, FreeWRT, etc. (free firmware for lots of these types of routers).
I have been looking at the alternatives. While don't know about the others but this is not so nice to see of DDWRT http://xwrt.blogspot.com/
Sure, it would be nice if someone would add support for ARM, MIPS, etc. to LinuxBIOS, but currently we don't support those architectures.
For routers where there's OpenWRT support it's not that pressing to have support, either (IMO). But it would sure be interesting to support "high-end" embedded MIPS, ARM, PowerPC stuff...
Any volunteers? :-)
Also, maybe embedded, meaning the EPIA motherboards?
Yes, that too. Different people call different things "embedded" ;-)
Via Epia and Geode systems are popular examples for what I would call "high-end" embedded systems.
Uwe.
http://www.hermann-uwe.de | http://www.holsham-traders.de http://www.crazy-hacks.org | http://www.unmaintained-free-software.org
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Thank you all for your answers. Will keep an eye on if and when you guys do get it on some <bold> X86-compatible</bold> router :)
- -- Shirish Agarwal This email is licensed under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
065C 6D79 A68C E7EA 52B3 8D70 950D 53FB 729A 8B17
I have been looking at the alternatives. While don't know about the others but this is not so nice to see of DDWRT http://xwrt.blogspot.com/
There are a number of Open Source projects in the router space, some of them do a really admirable job. DD-WRT is taking flak at the moment because of going 'commercial' - ignore that, there are probably a lot of users who find DD-WRT really good. There are also a number of other really good Open Source projects in this embedded router space.
There are very few routers available using x86 technology mainly because there are some really good and inexpensive SoC's which are quite man enough to do the job required based on MIPS, ARM, PPC and other architectures. A Router does not require a VGA controller, for example, nor does it require a PCI bus or various other bits of hardware of a traditional x86 platform, all of which results in lower cost silicon.
I have worked a lot with LinuxBIOS, but have had a few projects recently where I have been forced to use ARM architecture. I weighed up the alternatives of using LinuxBIOS against the traditional loaders for ARM processors (I am sure the same would apply with MIPS and PPC processors), and there are compelling reasons not to use LinuxBIOS for these alternatives, mainly because LinuxBIOS is (primarily) designed to boot x86 architecture systems, and in it's design is expecting to have to enumerate PCI busses etc. In ARM/MIPS/PPC environments, the amount of hardware initialisation is often far, far less than what is required for an x86 environment, and hence, LinuxBIOS is a bit of overkill.
I know that there was a lot of work done a few years ago for PPC in LinuxBIOS (for the life of me I cannot remember the name of the contributor - who did contribute a HUGE amount), and as far as I am aware, this development effort has basically ceased, although do not quote me on this please. I am also aware that the targeted processor included PCI bus and a few PC-style peripherals, so in that instance LinuxBIOS may have been a good fit.
I personally have been involved with one GPRS/HSDPA router project based on an Atmel AT91RM9200 SoC, which has a unique and quite tricky boot process, and is certainly not suited to LinuxBIOS. I have also been involved with a number of router devices using the Broadcom MIPS based chips, and purely to retain backward flashing capabilities, the original Broadcom boot loader is used, meaning we have very little use for something like LinuxBIOS.
All this being said, I work a lot with the OpenWRT project (and am now on the core dev team), and this project does have a very active dev environment for x86 platforms. At this stage, the x86 platforms still rely on a traditional BIOS, mainly because this part of the project is aimed at generic x86 platforms, and to port LinuxBIOS to all of the possible supported hardware would be a huge task. I am sure once someone starts developing dedicated router-style platforms, this part of the project would benefit greatly from a LinuxBIOS port, but, it is not there yet in volume.
Hamish
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Hamish Guthrie -
roger -
shirish -
Uwe Hermann -
Ward Vandewege