From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Mar 29 13:23:35 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from acl.lanl.gov (acl.lanl.gov [128.165.147.1]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2809A37B554 for ; Wed, 29 Mar 2000 13:22:58 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from rminnich@lanl.gov) Received: from mini.acl.lanl.gov (root@mini.acl.lanl.gov [128.165.147.34]) by acl.lanl.gov (8.8.8/8.8.5) with ESMTP id OAA3100337 for ; Wed, 29 Mar 2000 14:22:56 -0700 (MST) Received: from localhost (rminnich@localhost) by mini.acl.lanl.gov (8.9.3/8.8.8) with ESMTP id OAA04399 for ; Wed, 29 Mar 2000 14:22:56 -0700 X-Authentication-Warning: mini.acl.lanl.gov: rminnich owned process doing -bs Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2000 14:22:56 -0700 (MST) From: "Ronald G. Minnich" X-Sender: rminnich@mini.acl.lanl.gov To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: How good a job of PCI config will freebsd do? In-Reply-To: <200003292101.NAA00799@mass.cdrom.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Wed, 29 Mar 2000, Mike Smith wrote: > Yeep. You don't know Fra Dolcini, do you? That looks like a Really > Unpleasant Undertaking. 8( It's getting there. Also SiS is now a supporter. Long term, we may see motherboards specifically designed for the OSS community, with real docs yet. Also, I can't see any way to get to 3-second reboot (one of the things we need) given the stupid way BIOSes work. PXE is not an answer. > cluster hardware over for a pile of IA64 boxes just yet, but it strikes > me that it'd be easier just to write a userland flash updater than to > rewrite the BIOS from scratch. 8) You haven't look at how intel designs and documents some of their motherboards, particularly the L440GX+. They won't tell people what they need to know to update flash on this one. Result: you have to boot DOS to upgrade flash. Stupid of them. Also, there are an amazing number of advantages to having a real OS in the flash. Once you start thinking about it, it becomes hard to live without. ron To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message