[LinuxBIOS] one last note

Ronald G Minnich rminnich at lanl.gov
Mon Jan 23 05:24:38 CET 2006


Adam Talbot wrote:
> Currently trying to port the EBC3410, but if I could find a small GX2 
> board for a good price I would switch. My project is all about boot time 
> and that built in DDR memory controler REALY speeds things up.
> My current board.
> http://www.bcmcom.com/bcm_product_ebc3410.htm

Adam, if you do this port, it will help gx2.

What are you doing about the VSA stuff?

The geode has some real IP baggage .... I'm trying to talk to AMD about 
this, as it dates back to the NSC days. If we go with Geode, and we want 
(e.g.) VGA, we're going to have a huge binary blob of proprietary code 
in the middle of linuxbios. Hmm, not that much different than VGA, eh? 
But, you get the big blob from these guys: 
http://www.insydetech.com/productcenter/amd/geodesite/index.cfm

i.e., a proprietary BIOS vendor seems to be the control point for the 
AMD geode code, although the code seems to be freely available in some 
form or another. This is kind of weird. I don't quite know why it is 
done this way.

ron




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