[coreboot] Offtopic - Request for opinions...

[Darmawan Salihun]

On Sat, Apr 5, 2008 at 3:17 AM, Nathanael D. Noblet <nathanael at gnat.ca> wrote:
> Hello,
>    Long time lurker, and old time attempter... (waay back in v1 with an
>  sis 535 or something like that)...  Anyway, I have a project that our
>  company may be undertaking and some of it relies on instant on / small
>  form factor computers. Think kiosk type system. We'll be running linux,
>  custom built or one of the super small distros, built to run off a CF
>  card or boot off the network. Here's where I've got some questions that
>  I imagine people on this list may have some expertise.
>
>    We'd hope to have something that has hardware accelerated graphics
>  capabilities (likely using DirectFB for graphics) so something that has
>  linux drivers would be a major plus. We'd potentially like to use more
>  than one monitor per device. We don't need many of the common parts on a
>  regular PC or mini-ITX type boards, but are wondering what kind of
>  company you would approach to get something like that built. We'd like
>  to have coreboot as the bios to help with boot times etc. If you were
>  looking for something like that, where would you go? Most of the miniITX
>   boards don't quite fit the need. I'm wondering what volumes you'd need
>  for a custom board to reach that same price, considering we'd really
>  have very little on the device, cpu, ram, cf, video and a network. Which
>    I guess describes almost all computers... Anyway, pointers on where
>  to purchase, or get a board developed that could do stuff like this.
>  We've initially contemplated the Via boards, but have seen that there
>  are more and more offerings out there. The Geode based systems could be
>  fine if there was hardware assistance for the graphics we imagine...
>  Anyway, any pointers on a stuff like this would be appreciated.

Does an AMD 690G system fit your requirement? it has two video outputs,
most vendors implement one as regular VGA and the other one as HDMI.
It has solid ATI Linux driver ( I have test it both in x86 32-bit and
x86_64 Linux).
The driver takes quite a large space though, but I think your CF will be enough
to host it. As for the Linux BIOS support, I think AMD already working
on it but
not released publicly yet, for high volumes "client" like your need, AMD might
be giving special assistance or something, ask the AMD guys here ;-).

-- 
Regards,

Darmawan Salihun
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