Gentlemen, Can Coreboot support multiple PCMCIA ExpressCards like an 8 raid setup.
Will it support hot swap, hot plug-n-play and auto-configuration. Will it enable booting an OS from an Expresscard. Will it support advance Expresscard support. All other Bios Firmware makers are way behind in supporting the most underrated and versatile computer I/O known to man. Can coreboot be configured for this support or does it already support those feature?
n. prince wrote:
Can Coreboot support multiple PCMCIA ExpressCards like an 8 raid setup.
An ExpressCard slot has one PCIe and one USB connection. Many cheap cards only use USB. Using the FILO payload it's possible to load a kernel from USB. FILO does not support RAID. Using Linux as payload it will probably work completely automatically.
Will it support hot swap, hot plug-n-play and auto-configuration.
Linux as payload, yes. FILO, no. But what do you want to hotplug during boot?
Will it enable booting an OS from an Expresscard.
See above, both Linux and FILO can do this.
Will it support advance Expresscard support.
By this I suppose you mean the PCIe interface. The ExpressCard should look like any other PCIe and if there is a card plugged in then coreboot should enumerate it, and FILO should be able to see a controller. Hotplugging is not supported by coreboot and FILO. That means that a PCIe card must be plugged in before coreboot enumerates the PCIe. (Usually a few 100 ms after power on.) I don't think we have seen coreboot run on a system with ExpressCard yet however, so this is just the theory of how it should work. If you can send debug output from a system with coreboot and ExpressCard that would be interesting.
All other Bios Firmware makers are way behind in supporting the most underrated and versatile computer I/O known to man. Can coreboot be configured for this support or does it already support those feature?
Remember that coreboot never loads the operating system - that is the job of the payload. coreboot initializes all PCIe devices, and should also initialize those in an ExpressCard slot (they are not different from any other PCIe) but ultimately what can be used to load an operating system depends on the payload.
With Linux as the payload you have a very complete device driver stack that you can use to boot your system.
//Peter
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n. prince -
Peter Stuge