[LinuxBIOS] LinuxBIOS Summit: Draft Schedule

[Li-Ta Lo]

Hi,

We are working on the agenda for LinuxBIOS summit. Here is a draft 
version. Please give us any suggestion and help you have.

We categorized the attendance into three parties, the vendors, the users
and the developers. We hope the three parties can each describe their
past experience, outstanding problems and future directions such that
these three parties can help each other.

The first day will be focus on current status report. We are going to
have 

	Oct. 11
		Vendor Presentation
			1. Richard Bruner from AMD will talk about 
			AMD's plan on LinuxBIOS and their roadmap
			for their products.
			2. LNXI will give us their experience on
			integrating LinuxBIOS in their cluster
			products.
			3. Terra soft will give us their plan of
			using LinuxBIOS in their PPC 970 products.

		User Experience
			Users from Sandia and Los Alamos will talk on
			their experience of using LinuxBIOS in clusters.

		Developer Status Report
			Developers will give presentations and hands-on
			demo of recent development. Topics includes:
				1. Dual Core support for AMD K8
				2. Cache As Ram support for Intel and 
				   AMD processors.
				3. Integrating VGA BIOS support in your
				   LinuxBIOS.

On the second day we will focus on making LinuxBIOS more friendly for
people of the three parties:

	Oct. 12
		User Friendly
			1. User Interface: What kind of default payload
			   and/or user interface are we going to use?
			   Do we want it to be command line or menu
			   style?
			2. User's Manual.

		Developer Friendly
			1. KConfig: Josaih England will show us his
			   work on using KConfig to replace the current
			   config tool.
			2. Development Model: What is the svn commit
			   and release process?
			3. Device Object Model: People still complain
			   about the complexity of the current device
			   model. Can we make it easier to work with?
			   What is the impact of a new config too like
			   #1 on the device model? How are we going to
			   generate PIRQ/ACPI etc. tables?
			4. Programmer's Manual.

		Vendor Friendly
			1. We need to discuss the possibility of 
			   signing N-party NDA with vendors for
			   their unreleased products.
			2. How can we ensure 3rd party that our code
			   is clean and free of legal trouble?
			3. Binary blob and EFI/Tiano Interface. How
			   are we going to play nice with Intel? 

		Hackathon
			If anyone get inspired during the discussion,
			start implement your idea immediately!!

On the third day we will look forward further into the future:

	Oct. 13
		Crazy Ideas
			1. FreeFI: Possible name change and official
			   FSF sponsorship.
			2. LinuxBIOS as Linux: Ron just doesn't give up
			   his old LinuxBIOS==Linux idea. He will show
			   how he is recycling it.

		Homework Assignment
			Hey, you had a good time. It is time to do your
			homework now.

-- 
Li-Ta Lo <ollie at lanl.gov>
Los Alamos National Lab