On Tue, Aug 28, 2007 at 08:17:45PM +0200, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote: > On 28.08.2007 19:38, Uwe Hermann wrote: > > On Tue, Aug 28, 2007 at 12:48:06AM +0200, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote: > >>> created. So I carefully wonder what the real goal of such a call would > >>> be, except gathering random people with random boards? Something like: > >>> We have 10 people who are willing to work on this or that mainboard if > >>> you get them a system they can keep for doing the work, given that the > >> Would it be possible to create sort of a pseudo-port which only ensures > >> working RAM, serial and flashing? Such a pseudo-port would leave people > > > > No, "working RAM" is already 95% of the work in most cases. > > If that were the case, we'd have dozens of recent boards supported.
OK, if you talk about boards where northbridge+southbridge is already supported it's less work, yes (still not trivial, though). > Think of all the MCP55 boards. RAM works. North- and southbridge are > supported. The "little things" are what keep us from supporting them > completely. A generic MCP55 port which loads the payload (additional > board init etc.) over serial can be the ideal starting point. Why? I don't really see a use for this. If someone is able to run such a payload, build LinuxBIOS, test patches etc. it's not much additional work to just add proper support for the board in the first place. No need for such a "test-payload", I think. Yes, a couple more MCP55 and CK804 boards would be nice; I'm working on A8NE-FM/S (I already sent a preliminary patch a few weeks ago), and the K9N Neo is a good candidate, too (which I have here, just lack some spare time to work on it). > Maybe publish an article on lwn/slashdot/whatever about flashrom? You'd > have to make sure people merge MAC addresses and other stuff from the > old into the new image, though, otherwise we'll have a load of boards > with the same MAC address and quite a few of them may have > 00:00:00:00:00:00, resulting in malfunction of some switches, network > stacks etc. Can you elaborate? Where is the MAC address stored? On which boards? I doubt that all boards out there do this. What happens if you download a BIOS image from $VENDOR website? Does the flasher contain special code to deal with the MAC address? > >> People want to flash their proprietary BIOS under Linux now, without > >> having to reboot. They benefit from flashrom support for their system as > >> much as we do. Giving people a working tool for something that is really > >> complicated right now could even make them interested in LinuxBIOS. > >> After all, they would have to visit our website to get flashrom. > > > > Full ack. How can we advertise flashrom some more? > > Article in widely read publication. I'll contact lwn.net and report back. Great, thanks! Uwe. -- http://www.hermann-uwe.de | http://www.holsham-traders.de http://www.crazy-hacks.org | http://www.unmaintained-free-software.org
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