[LinuxBIOS] virtual box

Carl-Daniel Hailfinger c-d.hailfinger.devel.2006 at gmx.net
Sat Oct 27 03:01:48 CEST 2007


On 27.10.2007 00:51, Ward Vandewege wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 26, 2007 at 10:29:23AM -0700, ron minnich wrote:
>   
>> I think it's time we put an lguest kernel in flash, and show the world
>> how free software does virtualization.
>>     
>
> Yes!
>   

Indeed.

>> I want to buy a kick-ass(TM) mainboard which
>> runs LB, is supported by buildrom, and will support 2MB flash parts. I
>> want to buy the package from (e.g.) newegg. This will be a wiki entry
>> when I'm done.
>>
>> So:
>> - what board?
>>     
>
> How about that new mini-dtx gigabyte board that the SIS folks contributed
> code for?
>   

Not sure whether it supports SATA2. The board is not released yet and
the barebone Shuttle SS21T (same chipset, different board) got less than
stellar reviews for VGA output quality.

> Alternatively, the gigabyte m57sli-s4; but as Torsten pointed out today there
> are some issues still with PCI and PCI-E (interrupts) on that board. No acpi
> yet either. But it's not so hard to add a second SOIC/SPI chip on the free
> pads on the board - we have verified instructions (thanks Peter!). We can
> burn SPI chips now on this board thanks to Carl-Daniels work. The board is
> really very nice with 6 SATA ports and lots of bells and whistles.
>   

AFAIK there are even more pitfalls like Firewire etc.

I should verify my list of issues with the current M57SLI code and go
over each one to see it's fixed.

>> - any favorite video card? Cheap is better.
>>     
>
> Any $30 or so ATI card should be fine if you're not interested in super
> graphics performance; the free accelerated drivers should appear sometime
> soon-ish...
>   

We are talking about 6+ months from now for a well-working 3D driver for
R5xx cards according to sources in the Xorg camp. 3D drivers for earlier
cards are still further away. And $30 cards probably won't be R5xx.

> Didn't that mini-dtx board have onboard vga? Even cheap discrete video cards
> draw way too much power for my taste these days, if you're not interested in
> 3D acceleration.
>   

I'd like a board with onboard DVI connector. That gives you nice
graphics quality and can do both analog and digital monitor connections.
Unfortunately, all chipsets supporting that (Nvidia Geforce/ AMD SB600)
are unsupported under LB.
For the Nvidia chipset, that is unlikely to change because the number of
persons with access to the docs hovers around 1 and none of them (ha!)
has time to work on it.
For the AMD chipset, we can be sure AMD has access to its own data
sheets. ;-)


There are some really silent (read: no chipset fan required) and
affordable (sub €60) mainboards with AMD 690G/SB600 and a nice feature
set on the market. We'll see what gets supported in the future.

Carl-Daniel




More information about the coreboot mailing list