AMD64: Something's missing?

[Terry Blunt]

ebiederman at lnxi.com (Eric W. Biederman) wrote:

> Stefan Reinauer <stepan at suse.de> writes:
> 
> > * Eric W. Biederman <ebiederman at lnxi.com> [031013 15:23]:
> > > Sorry about that.
> >  
> > I fixed it for Solo, others will follow once I have the Solo up again.
> > 
> > > Before we declare this 2.0 instead of 1.1.xxx we should really have a
> > > target that will build everything in the tree that a person has the
> > > compilers for.
> > 
> > This would probably mean building only the linuxbios image without a
> > payload, since the payload paths differ pretty heavily across the
> > targets.
> 
> Yes.  I think so.  I have some plans afoot to enable flashing from rom
> images directly from ELF formated rom files instead of a raw binary image.
> Once that comes to pass relaxing the payload requirement should be much
> easier.   Allowing us to flash and build linuxbios and the payloads
> independently.  The tricky bit is figuring out the proper distribution
> format, so a novice user can't mess it up.

Ah! My cue I think.

Being a novice user. I currently run the Mandrake distro. I'm not entirely
clear where LinuxBios leaves off and the normal distros take over. Or even
if it works that way at all.

I *very* much like the idea of having as much of my system as possible
open-source, and I'm also keen on the fast start-up the website suggests
However, I'm concerend at the possibility of trying to re-flash my bios,
making a mistake and finding I have an unusable motherboard.

Can someone help me get a clearer understanding of what is involved?

-- 
Terry Blunt
My nightmare is the time when you walk into a room, reach towards
a quiescent computer and a deep, sonorous voice intones:
'You are about to make a mistake'