Bari Ari <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
>
> 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
> with a serial port, so serial console is fine. The all-in-one boxes out
> that don't have any slots and only USB for expansion will probably
> remain in the desktop world.
In truth besides the Beowulf type application I would really like to
use linuxBIOS on my PC. So focusing on embedded solutions is
> I may be the only nut here designing dense nodes that will only have the
> bareness for cluster apps that are stripped down to just CPU, RAM, and
> network controllers without any superI/O.
Maybe. I don't have any problem with building a board like that. I
just suspect that the development version of the board could benefit
from having a serial port. Maybe I just haven't written enough nic
drivers but doing a console over ethernet to debug RAM initialization
does not sound pretty :) And USB likewise. Anything that requires
DMA to use is not an appropriate interface for using before your RAM
is initialized.
The only thing I like about a serial console once a kernel is booted
is that it provides you with a redundant method of access to your
system. The other method being the network. I have had too many
problems with network drivers to really believe a single network
interface is a reliabel way to access a computer.
Eric
