[LinuxBIOS] Support for Intel G965 GMCH Chipset?

Peter Stuge stuge-linuxbios at cdy.org
Sun Oct 29 15:44:54 CET 2006


On Sun, Oct 29, 2006 at 05:41:17PM +0700, Chris Ziomkowski wrote:
> The G965 is not listed as supported, and I've been unable to find
> any comforting comments in the list archives. I am an accomplished
> embedded systems programmer, but my time is stretched very thin on
> this project. Do you guys believe I will be able to make this work
> without heroic efforts?

I guess it depends on whether you can get the chipset up fast enough.
It's a 400 page datasheet, some would definately say that
implementing code for that in very short time is heroic, but you may
be more used to it, and manage well. :)


> Second, the mainboards all come with an 8 Mbit BIOS flash. Will this
> be enough to boot Linux directly?

Likely yes, but it depends on how many things you must have compiled
into the initial kernel. Try compiling a kernel as you like it and
look at the size of arch/i386/boot/bzImage, or use LZMA to compress
vmlinux. It should be max 1Mb-32kb. You may want to investigate
linux-tiny as well.


> boards, so the only disk options are USB or SATA. I don't need
> video support. There will only be a serial console.

Good, you save the space for the VGA BIOS in the flash then, and
don't neccessarily have to implement support for the graphics stuff
in the 965.


> Assuming I can boot direct to Linux from the BIOS, would SATA or
> USB be more appropriate for loading the rest of the system?

I think SATA would be faster, simply because USB means at least one
more layer of code between physical disk and filesystem driver.


> Any comments would be appreciated. Am I getting in over my head?

Hard to say, it depends on your skill really. But it IS a tight
timeline.


> Do you think linuxbios is stable enough to consider for a
> commercial product?

I think LinuxBIOS is more stable than any commercial BIOS, and that's
just one of it's advantages. :)


//Peter




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