On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 11:26:43PM -0400, Mark Hahn wrote: > definitely not in general. a vendor could certainly provide IPMI > extensions that manipulate bios settings. but the market doesn't seem to > find this kind of HPC-mostly concern worthwhile :(
Well, it's not just for HPC anymore, all the warehouse computing guys (cloud) want this, too. I believe someone explained to me a long time ago that there is a standard way to read and write (but not interpret) the BIOS flash saved state, but the state is now too large to fit into the standard-sized area. > I wonder though, whether it would kill vendors just to publish the source > for their bios. Yes, it would. Not only is the source owned by AMI & Phoenix, and not mobo vendors, but it includes licensed stuff, and also secret workarounds to hardware bugs in lots of devices. Even IBM's BIOS (still used in a few high-end IBM x86 servers) is probably polluted that way. -- greg _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
