In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Ray Heasman writes: > Here are some suggestions for weird/easy/different things OGP could do. > None of them are the 2.5D idea I have, but I'm trying to advocate > something that might have a market and require next to no NRE to get to > market ASAP. (Cue official suggestions, with fanfare): > > 1) Make something that just sits on the PCI bus and indicates it has a > ROM that has to run during boot. Allow the FLASH that contains the ROM > to be reprogrammed in a relatively secure manner. This would allow you > to write code that took over a PC at boot time. You could put a > LinuxBIOS image in there, and have the LinuxBIOS boot your motherboard.
This sounds very very useful if there is some way to do it without using up a PCI slot. Only way that comes to mind is a combo board with SATA ports, Ethernet ports, whatever... as well as the ROM. > The LinuxBIOS people are constrained by the fact that most motherboard > ROMs are way too small. OGP could fix that. Too small? The firmware on my boards has room for lots and lots of nasty bugs. :-( > 2) Make a VGA compatible chip that does text modes only. Also add a USB > MAC and Ethernet MAC, some PS2 ports, and a CPU from opencores.org that > is supported by Linux. Run a simple SSH server in an embedded linux > image, and make the SSH server do a simple screen scrape of the text > mode RAM and represent it as a VT100 terminal. Keypresses in the > terminal are echoed to the PS2 port. Tada. Instant remote PC management > card for cheap colocated unix servers. Add in a connector to hook up to > the reset connector, and you can revive locked PCs remotely, change BIOS > settings during boot, etc. This sounds promising. Add a RS-232 port. _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
