I like the idea of a remote administration card... something that lets an administrator 3000 miles away reboot a machine, change BIOS settings, monitor various widgets, perform remote installs, etc.
So ideally the thing would function as a network adapter, graphics card, storage device(s), sensor(s), and input device(s). That's a lot of stuff to cram into a single card. Further, one of the big features would be the ability to perform remote installs from non-local media. In other words, the ability of the card to emulate a CD-ROM or hard drive, or floppy, or whatever and pull the actual data from some location over the network. That encapsulates a lot of possible configurations. I can see someone wanting to install from a GPG-encrypted loopback filesystem mounted via FUSE-based SSH filesystem over an IPSec encapsulated VPN session or something else equally horrible. So obviously this thing would have to be a somewhat generic CPU running Linux (or some other free OS - preferably with the ability to run any it's user may choose), with some RAM and storage space all it's own, connected to always-on power from the power supply, so that it's capable of intercepting very early video, and providing very early input. I work with some embedded MIPS CPUs in the form of a SOC from Broadcom. They're 200Mhz, have built-in 10/100 network interfaces, serial ports, mini-pci expansion bus, a few GPIO pins, etc. How feasible would it be to populate a PCI (or PCI-E) card with something like that, a flash chip (my machines have 8Mb, which feels downright roomy some days, but even 64Mb shouldn't be too hard), some RAM (my machines have 32Mb, 64Mb or more would be nice)? The card would have to report a unique vendor and device ID, which I'm not sure if most of these SOCs are designed to do (for that matter, can any of the cheap ones act as PCI devices? Can we make one work with some sort of bridge chip?), and we'd need to write suitable storage, and networking drivers at least... graphics and input are harder... They almost need to be hard-wired into the design, because we can't just write a new BIOS graphics or input 'driver'. Graphics don't have to be amazing... a frame or two a second, low-res... just enough to manage BIOS settings, and basic VGA stuff until you can get your OS of choice into a proper environment where we could rely on a custom per-OS graphics driver that simply translates directly to VNC or X or whatever (and that's if we want to be fancy). Input could be provided by pretending to be a USB adapter with HID-compliant input devices plugged in. That seems easy enough at least in theory. So I guess my question is how feasable would this be to do with a cheap embedded SOC and your favorite FLOSS OS instead of some crazy custom hardware? --tim _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
