[LinuxBIOS] thoughts on: gigabyte m57sli-s4 support

[Ryan Moszynski]

yeah,

i'd imagine there are a lot of people watching/waiting for this board
to be supported.  I would like to run linux-bios on my next machine,
but i'd rather not pay extra for server/board features that i will
never use.

so
my wishlist for a linuxbios:

1:consumer desktop board, running current intel/amd processors, with
at least one pci-e x16 card slot.

2:I will be able to be reasonably confident that the procedure won't
brick my motherboard

3:the system, using an add-on video card, such as the radeon
800(supported by xorg 7.2 - r300 driver) is able to give me console
video output while in bios mode(like n-curses,) but the videocard is
usable to the host machines operating system(linux/xorg,) once
linuxbios hands over control of the machine. (without me having to
extract any binary data from the manufacturer's bios, (i've never
tried it, but that sounds like a pain in the ass.))

pie_in_the_sky_wish: being able to remotely reset/reboot my machine
from a crashed state over a network(without relying on
expensive/unreliable commercially available solutions, or the
half-assed spit and shoestring hacked together hardware solution my
organization currently uses on production machines.)

That would be awesome.

So, right now it seems that you guys are pretty close to being able to
do this with the gigabyte/nvidia/am2 board, and that the last big
problem i see (once the debug/usb stuff is taken care of,) is finding
a consistently reliable way to load the bios onto motherboards that
don't have the bios stored on removable flash cards, but are hardwired
to the board.  To me, this looks like a big problem, but one that
needs a solution for linuxbios to be usable outside of machine
rooms/datacenters/beowulfs, since pretty much all consumer boards are
built  this way.

just my 2-cents, i'm sure you guys are already aware of most of my points.

lastly,

i would like to thank those of you driving this project.  I really
think that you guys are doing important work.

thanks

ryan

p.s.-> feel free to point out any ignorance in the above post.  I'm
trying to wrap my head around and understand the various issues going
on here, but i'm still pretty new.  If i'm wrong about something i'd
rather know.  I won't get offended.


On 2/28/07, Ward Vandewege <ward at gnu.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 28, 2007 at 10:02:12PM +0000, Dave Crossland wrote:
> > On 28/02/07, Stefan Reinauer <stepan at coresystems.de> wrote:
> > > * Ward Vandewege <ward at gnu.org> [070228 22:02]:
> > > > Add support for the Gigabyte m57sli-s4 board to flashrom.
> > > >
> > > > Signed-off-by: Ward Vandewege <ward at gnu.org>
> > >
> > > Acked-by: Stefan Reinauer <stepan at coresystems.de>
> > > and committed in r2564.
> >
> > Is this the final piece that was mentioned as missing to date? :-)
>
> No, the missing bits are usb/debug related. But have a look at the patch that
> Carl-Daniel posted today (haven't tried it yet). This is just to get flashrom
> to work correctly.
>
> > Also, my machine arrived today, and its BIOS is indeed soldered on. My
> > supplier advised that I won't be able to get a BIOS Saviour or spare
> > chip, and I'll have to get the LinuxBIOS upgrade right the first time,
> > or I'll brick the motherboard... :-(
>
> Yeah. We're going to desolder the chip, and put a socket on, so that we can
> use a bios savior.
>
> Thanks,
> Ward.
>
> --
> Ward Vandewege <ward at fsf.org>
> Free Software Foundation - Senior System Administrator
>
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