Ronald G Minnich wrote:
> On Thu, 21 Dec 2000, Bari Ari wrote:
>
> > We'd be happy to make available a preprogrammed DOC or daughtercard
> > with LinuxBIOS that plugs into a motherboard BIOS ROM socket
> > featuring:
> >
>
> Bari, that sounds pretty interesting but cost would be a big factor, you'd
> have to really make it cheap. Is that possible?
>
> ron
A card with just DIP type sockets and jumpers or dip switch to set the active device
to factory BIOS
or DOC could be done for a few dollars..... I'd probably just post the design
(schematics, Gerber's
and bill of materials) or offer a bag of parts with a PCB as a kit. A paged out
expanded flash
memory version for the DOC would be a few dollars more. It all would depend on volume.
The majority
of the cost in the design is the DOC itself.
There are alternatives to DOC as well such as Sandisk , Silicon Storage Technology
or even flash
arrays along with Datalight FlashFx , there are also some open source flash file
systems we have
been considering. The GPL flash file systems are very nice for keeping the cost of a
DOC down and
you don't have to go through the shell game with using the M-Systems parts.
With M-Systems Remember: Due to GPL restrictions the built-in Linux driver provides a
non-redistributable kernel. To redistribute this kernel the GPL requires the entire
source on
request, which is unavailable for the DiskOnChip driver. The solution, to a
redistributable kernel
that operates with a DiskOnChip, is to set up the driver as a loadable module.
Bari
