> I am interested in hearing what features people would
> want to have on a motherboard/mainboard designed from the
> ground up specifically for Linux.
> 1. OpenFirm Ware.
> 2. Geek port similar to the BeBox.
> 3. Common Hardware Reference Platform Compliant (CHRP)
A board the way I want it:
A big flash rom for the kernel, and a smaller one for the bios. Both
flashes have flash programming code so one may be used for programming
the other. Have the chips in sockets so those who really screw up can
take them out and have them reprogrammed elsewhere.
Put every chip in sockets so anything can be replaced easily. This is
good for repairs when some experimental card goes wrong and short cirquits
a bus.
Make the board as a kit, where you buy the board with sockets and
connectors only. Everything else is *optional*, such as the ISA/PCI bus
driver chips, on-board ide/scsi/io-ports, cache memory and so on. I
should be able to buy what I want and not much more. And replace anything
that breaks or turns out to be buggy.
Production cost would hopefully not be too high for a card with sockets
only and the chips in a bag. :-)
Make a card with lots of potential but the ability to go cheap too. Those
who "fully populate" their card should be able to fit
several cpu's, fill their address space with RAM, connect lots of cache,
utilize several 64-bit PCI buses, and connect some extra flash ROM's for
custom purposes.
Those who go cheap may want to fit a single cpu and bus drivers for only
one pci bus.
Those who build a beowulf may want to fit support for processors, ram and
ethernet only. No need for a keyboard controller or any kind of disk
access.
An optional section for general-purpose i/o would be nice too. This
should include room for some A/D D/A chips, timers, shift registers,
memory access hardware for offloading the cpu, and several digital i/o
lines. Connections between these items should be programmable (maybe a
PGA or something?) so that many kinds of parallell, serial or analog
interfaces can be implemented. Lots of fun for hardware hackers, and
others may use the A/D D/A stuff for recording/playing sound.
If the board is designed for linux, worry too much about "dos
compatibility." I.e. no need for implementing the 640k barrier in
hardware. The bios memory test should definitely not make an artifical
distinction between "base" and "extended" memory. There should be
"memory" only. No special "shadow ram" either, this can be done in
software
using page tables for those that really want it.
Helge Hafting
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