* Ronald G Minnich rminnich@lanl.gov [010821 21:00]:
yep, that's what we all want. But you're going to have to pick one to start.
You might want to try the SiS 630E based mainboards, since both Tiara and linuxbios run on those. So we understand the issues.
I thought about getting a new development machine at home pretty soon and I saw that the Gigabyte GA-7DXR has dual bios functionality, but until now I was not able to detect the second flash chip with /dev/bios :-( (Has anyone specs for this?) This would probably make it a perfect test machine since you can switch back and forth between the firmwares. Otoh, it might be wiser not to use an almost bleeding edge chipset to do this on :)
No, AFAIK it will be targeted to be Open Firmware compliant, and therefore working on different archs.
that doesn't make any sense to me. the arch has nothing to do with open firmware compliance.
No, but as Open Firmware has a (for my taste) very clean concept and clear defined handling of endianesses and register sizes including 64bit/32bit compatibility, this should make it easier, once we have a working low level startup code.
BTW, does the DS10 you used for your tests have a socketed flash? We have two here, but both have soldered SMD flash roms. Unfortunately, I did a mistake when I was flashing LinuxBIOS the last time. As they only do in rom FSB, there's no way out except calling compaq service.
Are there any sis 630 boards you can recommend? As LinuxBIOS supports loading ELF images over network now, I'd like to stay away from using DOC parts.
I read your statement that sdram is not supported by linuxbios at the moment. Is this (still) true? I have an old NMC (Enmic) board running an AMD K6-2 on an older Via Apollo (I think it's MVP3) chipset at home. But when I tried to adopt the support for Via chipsets in linuxbios to that chipset (as far as I saw, most registers are the same on that one) the efforts only resulted in a triple fault reboot from the CPU. Unfortunately this board only has SDRAM slots. What is the exact problem with SDRAM (please forgive the stupid manner of this question ;) )
Best regards Stefan