On Thu, 14 Jun 2001 17:24:37 -0500, Bari Ari wrote:
>The majority of LinuxBIOS apps. seem to be for the highly religious
>Beowulf community that only use OTS commodity motherboards. These
>motherboards will probably have or at least have a slot for a superI/O
Perhaps for now. Linux is fast becoming "the" os to use for embedded
apps. PC style (IA-32, ARM, PowerPC, etc) hardware grows cheaper
every day. Already we have seen the number of requests for info on
this list more than double in the last 6-months. When you consider
the cost of a COTS bios dev kit (We paid $15k, plus $7/copy) vs the
cost of LinuxBIOS its easy to see why it will soon be standard in
embedded systems.
It would aready be in our system but the 440BX support wasn't far
enough along yet and we didn't have enough cycles to spare to get it
that way before our project deadline.
Personally I think the more ways to boot/debug/admin the better be it
USB parallel or whatever. I agree with Erik on the serial ports
though. We drop a 16550 just for debugging on just about every
product we make and then just don't load it on production runs.
Perhaps in absence of serial ports a type of USB fake serial port
will arise. Something where you can still just bang a value to an IO
port and it will handle all the USB issues for you. I understand
that the USB hardware isn't much but that the software handshakeing
is fairly involved.
--
Richard A. Smith Bitworks, Inc.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] 501.846.5777
Sr. Design Engineer http://www.bitworks.com
