Getting a small cluster running - PC-Chips 810

Eric W. Biederman ebiederman at lnxi.com
Tue Feb 25 11:50:00 CET 2003


Andrew Ip <aip at cwlinux.com> writes:

> > I'm guessing that if I use the vendor-supplied BIOS flash utility, I 
> > don't need to muck around with MTD drivers, right?  Looking at the 
> > HOWTOs, that method seems to be extremely icky at the moment, 
> > requiring kernel source edits.  I don't mind getting a single floppy 
> > drive, and moving it between slaves for this step.
> One of the advantages of LinuxBIOS is you can flash rom in Linux using
> flash_on and flash_rom which comes with LinuxBIOS.  With these utils, you
> don't need mtd.

It depends.  At least long term I really suspect the mtd stuff is going
to be more maintainable.  Mostly it is a matter of volume of use,
and the ease of adding new flash parts.  That and accessing some
of that hardware from user space makes me nervous.

The long term nice thing about the mtd layer is longer term you can actually
put a filesystem on your rom chip.  We are a long ways off from that yet but
still.

Eric




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