R&D Project

[Justin C. Darby]

I'm trying to get together funding for a research project at my company
to build a generic platform for high availability devices using Linux,
LinuxBIOS, etc, as the software portion.

I had some general questions about LinuxBIOS I wanted to ask while I'm
still collecting information to report in my project plan.

a) I have a requirement of a 4+ PCI slots, compact flash booting via
IDE, and a serial console. Video, sound, etc, are pointless for any
project we will take on. Onboard network ports are nice. What hardware
works best? I don't care about AMD vs. Intel, I want to know what
(hopefully easily available) motherboards are best served by LinuxBIOS
in general. If this is going to start a flame war, I don't mind personal
responses to this question. :)

b) Are there any known problems running any types of PCI cards? High
speed serial, ethernet, whatever, or if it works with Linux, it should
work just fine?

c) Can Disk-on-Chip BIOS solutions be reflashed several times? I would
like these machines to be remotely upgradeable in all aspects while
having a local device to boot from.

d) Are any SMP motherboards supported?

Thanks for your time,

Justin C. Darby