K8 news

[ron minnich]

For those just joining. 

Eric Biederman has a solid C compiler for x86 for no-memory situations.  
The amount of assembly code in LinuxBIOS shrinks day-by-day.  Stefan
Reinauer at Suse and Eric have been working on different parts of the K8
problem and have linuxbios up on K8 1, 2, and 4 CPU systems. YHLu of Tyan
has linuxbios up on the new K8 motherboard. Linuxbios also works now on
the Arima HDAMA.

Greg Watson and I have been upgrading the config tool. It is a substantial 
improvement. I am now easily able to track the tree and build with the new 
config tool only. The new tool is faster and produces more comprehensible 
makefiles. Perl expressions in makefiles are a thing of the past. The new 
tool is also much better for non-PC systems, e.g. PPC. 

I am also booting Linux directly out of FLASH using the 49LF080 1 Mbyte
parts.

I will be starting work on the NewISYS board soon.

AMD has provided support in many ways, including opening up the documents.
AMD should be credited for their longstanding support of LinuxBIOS on the
K8, going back to long before the K8 was officially released.

I think vendors such as AMD, LNXI, Suse, Tyan, Arima, and Newisys (I hope
I left no one else out) are to be commended for their support of LinuxBIOS
on this new CPU. This work represents a substantial financial commitment
on the part of these companies.

Thanks to you all.

ron