newbie - OpenBIOS

19 May 2005

Greetings all,

I've just subscribed.  I've been googling around for quite a while now,
looking for an interesting project that isn't already almost done, and
that isn't essentially closed to significant contributions from people
outside whatever organization sponsors the project.  That leaves out a
lot of otherwise interesting projects-- such as the kernel trace work at
opersys.com, or Fedora, or the crash-dump project (lkcd) just for a few
examples.

I confess I'm not just interested in "open source" for any altruistic
reason-- I'm really looking for a way to establish credentials in the OS
"community" (a much-overused word).  I bet such be will be increasingly
important in future years.

A little context: I'm using Fedora (FC3) here at work (nobody seems to
mind that I can't read half of HP's internal web pages, which mostly
only work right with IE; and I *certainly* don't mind! :-)   I naturally
poked around Redhat's site looking for Fedora work, but all they really
offer is a bugzilla listing.  98% of reported FC bugs are either with
badly outdated releases, or expansion hardware I don't have.

However there *does* seem to be an issue with FC3 and the 2.6.11
kernel-- with several reports of solid system hangs/lockups, where the
computer essentially freezes in place.  Now on an Alpha, all you'd have
to do is hit the halt button, type "cra" at the ">>>" prompt,
and
reboot; once in multiuser you'll have a crash dump waiting for your
debugging pleasure.  But I've never seen the PC that had a halt button
that didn't instantly put you in POST, which kinda limits the chances of
copying memory to the swap partition.  So at least on the PC
architecture, there doesn't seem to be a reliable way to do a postmortem
on a wedged kernel.

Obviously, the BIOS is a problem.  Which leads me to you.  What needs
doing?

thanks!
-- 
Douglas Frank    HP Co.
ZKO              110 Spit Brook Rd.       The older I get,
603-884-0501     Nashua, NH USA 03062       the better I was.