Off you go… into the purple yonder!

I’ve got a number of servers that run coreboot + Xen. I like to run coreboot with a linux-as-a-bootloader (LAB) payload. That means that coreboot, after bringing up the machine, boots into a small linux kernel + busybox environment, entirely contained in rom. That environment can serve as an emergency fallback to resolve booting problems [...]

It’s official - we have a new logo!

Many thanks to the folks who made this happen:
* Konsult Stuge
* coresystems GmbH
* Kitchener Waterloo Linux User Group and Richard Weait
* Breakfast Design

The coreboot symposium in Denver was a success. As I announced during my talk there, Silicon Mechanics has pledged to ship servers with coreboot preinstalled - more in particular, their Rackform nServ A236 model, which is a 1U pizzabox with a nice dual-socket F Opteron board by supermicro. I’ve got a bunch of those machines [...]

I checked in some code to add support for the m57sli-s4 to buildrom, the LinuxBIOS kconfig-style configuration tool that allows easy building of rom images. FILO and linux-as-a-bootloader (LAB - i.e. a linux kernel + busybox in the ROM chip) are now supported via buildrom, and the build tutorial has been updated to reflect this [...]

I got a Soekris 4801-60 for use as a firewall/gateway at one of my (very) remote setups. These things are reliable, very low power, and they have no moving parts if you boot off compact flash. They are Geode-based, so it’s x86. You can run the various flavors of BSD on them, or your favorite [...]

ST wrote up a nice howto on adding a PLCC socket to the m57sli-s4.
This is a great alternative to de-soldering the original chip to add a socket. He still needs to do some more testing, but this sure looks promising!
In other news, the LinuxBIOS v2 mainline tree now has the m57sli-s4 code merged, so it [...]

Bari Ari wrote to the LinuxBIOS mailing list a couple days ago announcing FLASH-PLAICE: a programmer, logic analyzer and in-circuit flash emulator project that will speed up LinuxBIOS development considerably.
The project is based off an inexpensive Xilinx Spartan FPGA development board ($150). The idea is to use it to build a flash emulator that can [...]

I’ve written up a LinuxBIOS build tutorial for the Gigabyte m57sli-s4.
This tutorial still works off Yinghai Lu’s big MCP55 patch, but a patch from Ed Swierk hit the list today which resolves the last issues for building the m57sli code (if you disable the USB debug code). I’ve tested it - it works fine - [...]

I finally managed to get the Gigabyte M57SLI-S4 to boot LinuxBIOS today. Turns out that some kernel boot parameters were required to make it do the right thing with the IRQs.
It’s not perfect yet: the network interface doesn’t work, there’s no ACPI support, the USB debug device support needs to be disabled (probing for the [...]

Yesterday, someone posted a message to the linux kernel mailing list announcing LinuxBIOS support for the Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4 board. The M57SLI-S4 is a higher end desktop-class board that can be had for around $120.
This announcement was reported all over the internet, in many languages. Unfortunately there’s quite a bit of misinformation doing the rounds - [...]