Hi all, I have a feeling that the serial console, the only way to configure a Soekris, is very 1970s. Admittedly it is quite reliable, but slow, fiddly, most modern computers don't even have a serial port any more, and I've found USB-to-serial converters quite unreliable, with dropped characters causing issues using the terminal and boot menu. Also, comBIOS appears to have a bug which causes the output of many boot loaders (including PXELINUX and GRUB) to be corrupted and unreadable.
I've found it useful to connect a Wiznet serial-to-LAN gateway to in-school servers, to allow remote access to the serial console even if the machine is misbehaving. However this is pretty ugly to look at, and fragile. It would be great if something like this was embedded on the motherboard. Even just UDP support in comBIOS would be useful, to allow remote initiated PXE boot or alternate boot of machines that had a corrupt filesystems. If the BIOS was open source then we could do this ourselves. (Incidentally is there a reason that a custom BIOS was written instead of using LinuxBIOS/coreboot? has anyone done any work on getting coreboot to work on a Soekris? No Soekris boards are listed on the coreboot compatibility table.) There is also a USB Client device in the net6501, although not exposed. With a little bit of work (I hope) on the next version, this could be exposed and connected to the xilinx, which could act as a virtual serial or LAN adaptor on the USB side, be able to reset the processor and talk to the comBIOS. Similarly the xilinx could be wired to an ethernet MAC and handle serial-over-LAN, appearing to the OS as a virtual serial port. Finally, there are other PCI devices that might be useful, but are not exposed, such as the SDIO and TPM interfaces. Soren, do these sound like useful ideas for the next board? Cheers, Chris. -- Aptivate | http://www.aptivate.org | Phone: +44 1223 967 838 Future Business, Cam City FC, Milton Rd, Cambridge, CB4 1UY, UK Aptivate is a not-for-profit company registered in England and Wales with company number 04980791. _______________________________________________ Soekris-tech mailing list Soekris-tech@lists.soekris.com http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
