OpenBIOS news.

[daniel.engstrom at riksnett.no]

On 20 Nov, Stefan Reinauer wrote:
> 
> 1) Licence
>    Is anything speaking against using GPL as licence for OpenBIOS? I am
>    not really into that licencing stuff. Would it be better to use some
>    kind of BSD licence or even the Netscape NPL? I want to make sure that
>    this project will remain free forever and people can use it for free,
>    no matter whether it is commercial use or not. And, of course, I think
>    it would be best, if changes made by foreign contributors are included into
>    the official project. 

I thought a bit about that too. I think it should be GPL, no sane
person should consider the chip set registers or motherboard
interconnect trade secrets. And why use another license if you have no
secrets?
 
 
> 3) Supported hardware
>    Many people told me that they would like to see support for recent PCI
>    hardware only. I think this makes sense, because it's easy to autoprobe
>    chipset type and SuperIO type on the PCI bus. This allows us to have
>    one generic firmware image that can be flashed to a couple of different
>    machines that have different motherboards. This is especially nice for 
>    people with large computer pools (like admins of universitiy pools)

I'd say it is hard to probe the PCI bus before you're up and running
(DRAM working at least) and to come up and run you need to know which
chip set you're on... Besides in addition to what chip set and which
super I/O chip that is attached you might need to know hove some things
are wired on the mother board.
 
> 4) There have been many new wishes on the wishlist today, please check
>    them out at
>          http://www.freiburg.linux.de/OpenBIOS/wishlist/
>    and *DO* comment on them.

I have my own agenda quite clear... First get the thing runnig on one or
two chip sets, do FD and IDE read-only drivers, implement something like
syslinux that can boot a hacked Linux kernel in PM from disk.
After that we can start to take requests... :)

> 6) I thought about writing email to some chipset manufacturers to ask
>    whether they want to participate in our project by writing free code
>    for their hardware. Does anyone have an idea what to write?
Opti, SiS and Intel at least have docs available on the web, Ali doesn't
even have an email address to mail to on their web site... (Anyone who
knows an Ali sales rep?)

/Daniel
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