R&D Project

Eric W. Biederman ebiederman at lnxi.com
Sun Oct 13 12:28:01 CEST 2002


"Justin C. Darby" <jdarby at powercom.net> writes:

> I'm trying to get together funding for a research project at my company
> to build a generic platform for high availability devices using Linux,
> LinuxBIOS, etc, as the software portion.
> 
> I had some general questions about LinuxBIOS I wanted to ask while I'm
> still collecting information to report in my project plan.
> 
> a) I have a requirement of a 4+ PCI slots, compact flash booting via
> IDE, and a serial console. Video, sound, etc, are pointless for any
> project we will take on. Onboard network ports are nice. What hardware
> works best? I don't care about AMD vs. Intel, I want to know what
> (hopefully easily available) motherboards are best served by LinuxBIOS
> in general. If this is going to start a flame war, I don't mind personal
> responses to this question. :)

We have at least one board with 6 slots and 4 PCI-X busses...  
 
> b) Are there any known problems running any types of PCI cards? High
> speed serial, ethernet, whatever, or if it works with Linux, it should
> work just fine?

Only video....  And that is just initialization glitches.
 
> c) Can Disk-on-Chip BIOS solutions be reflashed several times? I would
> like these machines to be remotely upgradeable in all aspects while
> having a local device to boot from.

All recent BIOS solutions can reflashed several times.
 
> d) Are any SMP motherboards supported?

yes.

Eric



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