On Thu 2000-06-15 (15:25), Ronald G Minnich wrote:
well linuxbios is what I started here, and I pinged some folks on this
list about supporting freebsd as well as linux, and got a 'no interest'
back from some folks.
I'm still up for it. I think it's easy.
'linuxbios' will only support
On Mon 2000-06-19 (11:45), Neil Blakey-Milner wrote:
'linuxbios' will only support booting off Linux partitions?
I doubt they're replacing a multi-purpose, occasionally
not-all-that-clever thing, with a single-purpose very-often
not-all-that-clever thing?
Ah wait, having read a bit more,
On Mon, 19 Jun 2000, Neil Blakey-Milner wrote:
On Thu 2000-06-15 (15:25), Ronald G Minnich wrote:
'linuxbios' will only support booting off Linux partitions?
linuxbios is getting to be a misnomer, but ...
linuxbios is a simple chunk of FLASH-based code that gunzips a kernel
image to RAM.
On Mon, 19 Jun 2000, Ronald G Minnich wrote:
On Mon, 19 Jun 2000, Neil Blakey-Milner wrote:
On Thu 2000-06-15 (15:25), Ronald G Minnich wrote:
'linuxbios' will only support booting off Linux partitions?
linuxbios is getting to be a misnomer, but ...
linuxbios is a simple chunk of
Parag Patel wrote:
It can't, without shitloads of drivers. :)
("I asked you not to tell me that, Ninety-Nine!")
A new loader would need to be written that would have a way to talk to
whatever firmware is in the box, Open Firmware, LinuxBIOS, etc.
(Assuming that the firmware has a
On Tue, 20 Jun 2000 07:06:36 +0900, "Daniel C. Sobral" wrote:
And, in the process, they are teaching the firmware about Ext2FS,
Ext3FS, RheiserFS, (in our case) ffs, vinum, etc, so it can find the
kernel in whatever place it is, or resorting to some sort of bootfs
(though any software RAID would
On Mon, 19 Jun 2000, Parag Patel wrote:
It's fairly simple, other than dealing with the
various motherboard/chipset vagaries.
So far those vagaries are not much code, something like 200 lines tops.
It's possible to make a complete BIOS based on Linux that in turn loads
and boots another
Parag Patel wrote:
Well, it's more of a matter of putting the kernel itself into the boot
ROM with some small assembly/C code to turn on DRAM and an ungzipper to
load and run it. It's fairly simple, other than dealing with the
various motherboard/chipset vagaries.
Ah, yes, I forgot about
On 18-Jun-00 Parag Patel wrote:
On Sat, 17 Jun 2000 07:35:51 +0900, "Daniel C. Sobral" wrote:
Loader(8) runs using BIOS services, and loads the kernel from any drive
that BIOS recognizes. It has also been enhanced with PXE knowledge, so
he can load from that to.
My mistake, as Ron pointed
On 19-Jun-00 Coleman Kane wrote:
If you start out with a board based on a reference design, say the Intel
SE440BX, you already have access to all this info. Most chipset vendors have
info on this sort of thing up on their webpage, I know intel is really good
about this sort of thing (though
I never said it would be easy, I simply was stating that the reference
designs tend to stick to documented specifications, typically. Of
course, writing a BIOS is hard enough.
John Baldwin had the audacity to say:
On 19-Jun-00 Coleman Kane wrote:
If you start out with a board based on a
On Sat, 17 Jun 2000 07:35:51 +0900, "Daniel C. Sobral" wrote:
Loader(8) runs using BIOS services, and loads the kernel from any drive
that BIOS recognizes. It has also been enhanced with PXE knowledge, so
he can load from that to.
My mistake, as Ron pointed out, since loader uses the BIOS
On Sat, 17 Jun 2000 07:35:51 +0900, "Daniel C. Sobral" wrote:
Loader(8) runs using BIOS services, and loads the kernel from any drive
that BIOS recognizes. It has also been enhanced with PXE knowledge, so
he can load from that to.
My mistake, as Ron pointed out, since loader uses the
If you start out with a board based on a reference design, say the Intel
SE440BX, you already have access to all this info. Most chipset vendors have
info on this sort of thing up on their webpage, I know intel is really good
about this sort of thing (though I am not so sure about the
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED] Ronald G Minnich
writes:
: synergy micro sells power pc boards that boot linux today out of flash.
:
: www.synergy.com
:
: They get it too.
I boot FreeBSD out of flash every day. It isn't a big deal at all.
I've been doing this for at least 6 months.
I've done
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED] Parag Patel writes:
: manage their rack-mount systems remotely using the serial port without
: video and without a keyboard - something that few motherboards support.
Might I point out that there is the console weasil (or something to
that effect) that converts
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Daniel C. Sobral" writes:
: If your BIOS project recognizes the flash card as a disk, accessible
: with normal BIOS functions, then loader can work as is (minus whatever
: you need modified). If not, it can be changed to understand whatever you
: have to access the
Parag Patel wrote:
On Sat, 17 Jun 2000 07:35:51 +0900, "Daniel C. Sobral" wrote:
Loader(8) runs using BIOS services, and loads the kernel from any drive
that BIOS recognizes. It has also been enhanced with PXE knowledge, so
he can load from that to.
My mistake, as Ron pointed out,
On Mon, 19 Jun 2000 13:49:36 +0900, "Daniel C. Sobral" wrote:
Err... how is a loader that doesn't use BIOS going to access the hard
disk? I truly hope the answer is not to the effect of requiring
shitloads of drivers.
It can't, without shitloads of drivers. :)
("I asked you not to tell me
My mistake, as Ron pointed out, since loader uses the BIOS services, it
can't run when there is no BIOS. Now if someone writes a loader that
doesn't use a BIOS...
Err... how is a loader that doesn't use BIOS going to access the hard
disk? I truly hope the answer is not to the effect of
On Thu, Jun 15, 2000 at 07:29:53PM -0700, Mike Smith wrote:
If your customer's not _desperate_ for a super-low-cost solution, I'd
suggest any of the Intel boards that offer EMP (most of these also offer
BIOS-over-serial support, actually - as do a number of other vendors,
IIRC AMI do this
On Sat, Jun 17, 2000 at 06:13:32PM +0100, void wrote:
On Thu, Jun 15, 2000 at 07:29:53PM -0700, Mike Smith wrote:
If your customer's not _desperate_ for a super-low-cost solution, I'd
suggest any of the Intel boards that offer EMP (most of these also offer
BIOS-over-serial support,
So, I repeat: easily done, not acceptable to freebsd core.
As has been mentioned by several people already, 'freebsd core' hasn't
discussed this as a group and hasn't made any declaration of acceptabilty.
That said, I'll say (as a core member, but representing only myself) that
I think
On Thu, 15 Jun 2000, Stefan Molnar wrote:
I have not built clusters over 200 nodes, but I almost never
go into the BIOS for configurations. And the systems that
I have used, include serial access within the BIOS. And
adding PXE roms will make things nicer on the install front.
But my
John Baldwin ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
The best people to determin if it is nessesary is Yahoo and Hotmail.
Since they have worked with these issues in the thousands of machines.
Actually, Yahoo is basically who funded the PXE development as their
employees did most of the development
Two words: "forget it".
I read an article about Linux BIOS project on Slashdot.org. Is there
anybody working on FreeBSD BIOS?
I really like to see something like 'boot net - install' or serial
console. It would be cool to have dignostics routine, too.
I have
So, I repeat: easily done, not acceptable to freebsd core.
Erm, hello?
I really don't understand this message at all, Ron. As far as I know,
FreeBSD core has expressed NO opinion on this issue whatsoever and
it's therefore highly unfair of you to state that we:
a) Even have a firm
The key is that freebsd may need to change a few things to make it
bootable from cold hardware. I don't think this is for sure, but it may
happen. I hope the team is receptive to such changes ...
ie. "LinuxBIOS won't initialise the system correctly, so you'd better
clean up after it"?
How
I'm interested, since from reading the linixboot page it seems like
you can get, essentially, and instant-on rommable FreeBSD if this
were done, and I can think of lots of things to do with that!
I can think of a few useful things too! I might even be able to offer a
bit of help (at
Sergey Babkin wrote:
Eh ? I don't quite get how Sun could be associated with Open Firmware.
Probably because they developed it?
It always looked quite proprietary to me.
Yeah, those IEEE standards are terribly proprietary. IEEE-1275 in this
case. You can find more info at
On Thu, 15 Jun 2000, Doug White wrote:
On Thu, 15 Jun 2000, Stefan Molnar wrote:
I have not built clusters over 200 nodes, but I almost never
go into the BIOS for configurations. And the systems that
I have used, include serial access within the BIOS. And
adding PXE roms will
We really were hoping we'd get some help from a motherboard vendor but
that just hasn't been the case. No-one seems interested in the
relatively low quantities of boards we'd move.
Too bad we're already a big customer of these boards -- We'd love to have
this kind of information about
[EMAIL PROTECTED] said:
:- None of the motherboard or chipset vendors (except for SiS) are even
:- slightly interested in talking to us.
Are they interested in talking to Linux folks? If so, isn't that a
reasonable alternative? (I mean, team up with some Linux folks to
get the info...)
--
sorry, jordan.
my bad. Anyway we're going to try a kernel next week that parag sent me.
ron
To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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(paul asks a good microcode question). I can't answer it yet.
Here's my take on this: we're going to do a proof of concept of this idea.
We now have three partners: SiS, Compaq, and Dell. Long-term goal is to
get industry to pick it up. This is a means to an end. I don't want to be
Mr. LinuxBIOS
On Fri, 16 Jun 2000 11:13:18 EDT, Robert Withrow wrote:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] said:
:- None of the motherboard or chipset vendors (except for SiS) are even
:- slightly interested in talking to us.
Are they interested in talking to Linux folks? If so, isn't that a
reasonable alternative? (I mean,
On Fri, 16 Jun 2000, Parag Patel wrote:
No-one else seems to be interested.
actually, that's not quite true. we're seeing a fair amount of interest
here. I suspect vendors are not that interested in supporting another BIOS
unless/until they see potential $$$ ("value proposition" in MBA
On Fri, 16 Jun 2000, Stefan Molnar wrote:
I delgated the remote-hands to being my human on-off switch, or a
"blinky light" monitor.
Buy a bunch of RPC-2s or RPC-4s
http://baytechdcd.com/products/rpcseries.shtml
--
| Matthew N. Dodd | '78 Datsun 280Z | '75 Volvo 164E | FreeBSD/NetBSD |
|
[not on list]
Regarding the freebsd bios and availablity of firmware you should check out
http://developer.intel.com/technology/efi/index.htm
The sample implementation uses a FBSD core and provides
a tcp/ip stack
ftp client and server
python interpreter
read
http://developer.intel.com
Wes Peters wrote:
Sergey Babkin wrote:
Eh ? I don't quite get how Sun could be associated with Open Firmware.
Probably because they developed it?
Ah, that was my ignorance. never knew that Open Firmware is a trademarked
concept, like Open Source.
It always looked quite proprietary
Ronald G Minnich wrote:
my bad. Anyway we're going to try a kernel next week that parag sent me.
Mmmm. I saw no comments on my loader question.
Loader(8) runs using BIOS services, and loads the kernel from any drive
that BIOS recognizes. It has also been enhanced with PXE knowledge, so
he
On Sat, 17 Jun 2000 07:35:51 +0900, "Daniel C. Sobral" wrote:
Ronald G Minnich wrote:
my bad. Anyway we're going to try a kernel next week that parag sent me.
Mmmm. I saw no comments on my loader question.
Loader(8) runs using BIOS services, and loads the kernel from any drive
that BIOS
Hi,
I read an article about Linux BIOS project on Slashdot.org. Is there
anybody working on FreeBSD BIOS?
I really like to see something like 'boot net - install' or serial
console. It would be cool to have dignostics routine, too.
Jung-uk Kim
. Is there
anybody working on FreeBSD BIOS?
I really like to see something like 'boot net - install' or serial
console. It would be cool to have dignostics routine, too.
Jung-uk Kim
Jung-uk Kim: Unix System Programmer E-mail
Thus spake Stefan Molnar ([EMAIL PROTECTED]):
is already supported. ( On some high end machines serial console works
in the prom as well).
Also on low-end machines...
Alex
--
cat: /home/alex/.sig: No such file or directory
To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with "unsubscribe
On Thu, 15 Jun 2000, Alexander Langer wrote:
Thus spake Stefan Molnar ([EMAIL PROTECTED]):
is already supported. ( On some high end machines serial console works
in the prom as well).
Also on low-end machines...
According to pxeboot(8) from 5.0 snapshot:
pxeboot is a modified
Two words: "forget it".
I read an article about Linux BIOS project on Slashdot.org. Is there
anybody working on FreeBSD BIOS?
I really like to see something like 'boot net - install' or serial
console. It would be cool to have dignostics routine, too.
J
On Thu, 15 Jun 2000, Stefan Molnar wrote:
Why? PXE will allow net installs, or diskless. And Serial Console
is already supported. ( On some high end machines serial console works
in the prom as well).
well, now you see why i'm not pushing linuxbios too hard in the freebsd
world. If you
well linuxbios is what I started here, and I pinged some folks on this
list about supporting freebsd as well as linux, and got a 'no interest'
back from some folks.
I'm still up for it. I think it's easy.
I'd suggest you go talk to Parag Patel, who's just wasted about three
months of his
[EMAIL PROTECTED] said:
:- and got a 'no interest' back from some folks.
I'm interested, since from reading the linixboot page it seems like
you can get, essentially, and instant-on rommable FreeBSD if this
were done, and I can think of lots of things to do with that!
Don't know how much help
[EMAIL PROTECTED] said:
:- and got a 'no interest' back from some folks.
The response was not "no interest", it was "you're totally nuts - this is
not a usefully solvable problem".
I'm interested, since from reading the linixboot page it seems like
you can get, essentially, and
Mike Smith wrote:
well linuxbios is what I started here, and I pinged some folks on this
list about supporting freebsd as well as linux, and got a 'no interest'
back from some folks.
I'm still up for it. I think it's easy.
I'd suggest you go talk to Parag Patel, who's just wasted
So, I repeat: easily done, not acceptable to freebsd core.
I think this situation reflects on the freebsd community and not in a
positive way.
If you care, sometime this year you'll be able to buy motherboards that
boot Linux from flash. SiS is working hard on this and has committed
people and
On Thu, 15 Jun 2000, Sergey Babkin wrote:
Mike Smith wrote:
I'd suggest you go talk to Parag Patel, who's just wasted about three
months of his life trying to make SmartFirmware run on _one_ supposedly
well-documented board. Parag is nobody's fool, and I consider his
results pretty
I'm confused. Acceptable to freebsd core isn't really the issue here.
FreeBSD is a volunteer project. If you do the work and submit the code
then 'core' has the option of deciding not to include it but if its
useful people will use it anyway regardless if its 'Official' or not. If
enough people
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Ronald G
Minnich writes:
So, I repeat: easily done, not acceptable to freebsd core.
Uhm, Ron, I have not seen freebsd core take a stand on this,
and I'm a core team member, so I'm pretty sure they havn't.
I also doubt that they ever would do so.
Remember:
Ronald G Minnich wrote:
So, I repeat: easily done, not acceptable to freebsd core.
If you can easily do it, why aren't you? I had thought someone was
actively working on this (because it is SO obviously useful to have fast
reboots in an HA environment).
It's kind of a shame.
Sure is.
I have not built clusters over 200 nodes, but I almost never
go into the BIOS for configurations. And the systems that
I have used, include serial access within the BIOS. And
adding PXE roms will make things nicer on the install front.
But my current system is a single floppy, and that
I'd suggest you go talk to Parag Patel, who's just wasted about three
months of his life trying to make SmartFirmware run on _one_ supposedly
well-documented board. Parag is nobody's fool, and I consider his
results pretty representative of the issue.
Maybe I'm completely
So, I repeat: easily done, not acceptable to freebsd core.
And again I tell you, no. Quite acceptable, not easily done. If someone
does it, we'll happily play along. I don't understand why you don't
understand this.
--
\\ Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. \\ Mike Smith
\\
On Thu, 15 Jun 2000 14:47:32 PDT, Mike Smith wrote:
I'd suggest you go talk to Parag Patel, who's just wasted about three
months of his life trying to make SmartFirmware run on _one_ supposedly
well-documented board. Parag is nobody's fool, and I consider his
results pretty representative of
The best people to determin if it is nessesary is Yahoo and Hotmail.
Since they have worked with these issues in the thousands of machines.
Actually, Yahoo is basically who funded the PXE development as their
employees did most of the development and testing with PXE and now use
it in
here's what we can. Somebody send a kernel for an L440GX+ that has pretty
minimal stuff. I'd prefer it to have IDE, no networking, no SCSI, i.e. a
pretty small thing. I'll try to use it as the payload for linuxbios and
see if it boots.
The key is that freebsd may need to change a few things to
Mike Smith wrote:
I'd suggest you go talk to Parag Patel, who's just wasted about three
months of his life trying to make SmartFirmware run on _one_ supposedly
well-documented board. Parag is nobody's fool, and I consider his
results pretty representative of the issue.
Maybe
Mike Smith wrote:
I'd suggest you go talk to Parag Patel, who's just wasted about three
months of his life trying to make SmartFirmware run on _one_ supposedly
well-documented board. Parag is nobody's fool, and I consider his
results pretty representative of the issue.
here's what we can. Somebody send a kernel for an L440GX+ that has pretty
minimal stuff. I'd prefer it to have IDE, no networking, no SCSI, i.e. a
pretty small thing. I'll try to use it as the payload for linuxbios and
see if it boots.
GENERIC should work, presuming that the hardware's
On Thu, 15 Jun 2000 18:37:51 PDT, Mike Smith wrote:
ie. "LinuxBIOS won't initialise the system correctly, so you'd better
clean up after it"?
More like it ain't complete and is intended to boot Linux, so anything
that Linux initializes but FBSD doesn't is probably SOL. :)
I'm building a
Ronald G Minnich wrote:
On Thu, 15 Jun 2000, Sergey Babkin wrote:
Maybe I'm completely mistunderstanding the subject, but
what about EFI (Extendable Firmware Interface) ? It's the
We're looking at it. Do you really believe in reference implementations? I
don't. I sure hope they've
On Thu, 15 Jun 2000 18:37:51 PDT, Mike Smith wrote:
ie. "LinuxBIOS won't initialise the system correctly, so you'd better
clean up after it"?
More like it ain't complete and is intended to boot Linux, so anything
that Linux initializes but FBSD doesn't is probably SOL. :)
8) Actually,
On Thu, 15 Jun 2000 18:49:23 PDT, Mike Smith wrote:
8) Actually, the things that really bother me are eg. interrupt routing
and the ACPI GPIO bits, since the former is board-specific and you *must*
know about it to set PCI up, and the latter is often necessary to do
important things like, eg.
Well, the main reason we're replacing the BIOS is that we've had several
requests from people who want relatively sane firmware in their
computers. :) One of our (potential) customers needs to completely
manage their rack-mount systems remotely using the serial port without
video and without a
On Thu, 15 Jun 2000 18:49:23 PDT, Mike Smith wrote:
8) Actually, the things that really bother me are eg. interrupt routing
and the ACPI GPIO bits, since the former is board-specific and you *must*
know about it to set PCI up, and the latter is often necessary to do
important things like,
Well, the main reason we're replacing the BIOS is that we've had several
requests from people who want relatively sane firmware in their
computers. :) One of our (potential) customers needs to completely
manage their rack-mount systems remotely using the serial port without
video and
On Thu, 15 Jun 2000 19:29:53 PDT, Mike Smith wrote:
By now, based on the timeframe I've watched you
through, I'd say that you should have a board that looks like a plain VGA
framebuffer and has a keyboard cable hung out the back, and software up
and running. Build cost at 100 off would
On Thu, 15 Jun 2000 19:24:28 PDT, Mike Smith wrote:
Uh. You're kidding me, right?
Well, maybe a little. The L440GX+ board is well-documented with a nice
diagram documenting the IRQ swizzle. The SuperMicro board isn't, so I'm
probably screwed there.
I think it is possible to probe it by
Ronald G Minnich wrote:
here's what we can. Somebody send a kernel for an L440GX+ that has pretty
minimal stuff. I'd prefer it to have IDE, no networking, no SCSI, i.e. a
pretty small thing. I'll try to use it as the payload for linuxbios and
see if it boots.
I'm cc'ing Mike here so he can
Parag Patel wrote:
On Thu, 15 Jun 2000 19:29:53 PDT, Mike Smith wrote:
By now, based on the timeframe I've watched you
through, I'd say that you should have a board that looks like a plain VGA
framebuffer and has a keyboard cable hung out the back, and software up
and running. Build
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