Er, not so much [LWN.net]

Er, not so much

Posted Dec 8, 2006 5:42 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to: Er, not so much by bos
Parent article: LinuxBIOS ready to go mainstream (Linux.com)

That code messiness is one of the things that are being worked on apparently.

Google is now providing funding and resources for testing code. If AMD takes a active interest then it would be good also.

Especially when you throw virtualization into the mix then you start to have something interesting.

Say it's like this..
Imagine you buy your 'server' motherboard and it has Xen/Linux or other hypervisor kernel combo for the bios along with a 32MB flash for simple linux install.

You get the motherboard, throw on some harddrives and stick it into the case. No video card, no keyboard, no monitor, no serial ports, no nothing.

Plug the case into the power strip, plug in the network cable. Walk over to your desk and pop open your laptop or cell phone or whatever.

Open the web browser to the motherboard's http interface. Update the firmware image to the latest version. Kexec into it.

Partition (or maybe LVM) and format the harddrives. Maybe some software raid, or Open-iSCSI. who knows. Pull down your operating system image, or multiple images, and install them on your machine, then boot them up.

Various Open-source bios emulation stuff (such as is used in Qemu) and legacy I/O (vnc, serial ports, keyboard, mouse, parrellel ports) is emulated and accessable via ssh, or vpn, or whatever. Something.

Your finished.

Doesn't matter if the OS being installed is Linux or Windows or Dos or SCO or anything like that.

To me if I was Asus or Tyan or other motherboad maker I would be VERY interested in this technology. I know most of the above is possible nowadays, it may not be that easy to perfect, but think of the marketing possiblities!

For the cost of some testing and making sure your Linux is very compatable with your hardware you can now advertise your hardware has:

built-in hypervisor..
raid 0/1/5/10/etc capabilities. Even works when you abratrially add new PCIe sata/scsi adapters.
some logical volume management.
built-in iSCSI initiator that is transparent to the installed operating systems.
advanced web-based configuration system
advanced hardware monitoring and notification system.
built-in ability to image volumes, restore systems from backups, etc etc
and all sorts of other possibilities.

No extra licensing costs. No need to license a bios or anything like that. All of it built into the motherboard, all it costs is compatability with Linux and the small on-board flash drive. A big possiblity for increase in value with very little increase in cost.

All of it starts off, of course, with LinuxBIOS. :-)

In fact I don't know why more servers aren't shipped with built-in embedded Linux for system management possiblities.

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Er, not so much

Posted Dec 8, 2006 15:40 UTC (Fri) by horen (subscriber, #2514) [Link]

First of all, you've written an excellent and concretely thought-provoking post. Thank you.

Secondly, I'm embarrassed to admit that although I've heard of most of the items you mentioned (i.e., iScsi and PCIe), I'm not at all familiar with them.

Despite being a Linux/Unix sysadmin for 18 years, I've come to realize that even though I devote a good 1-2 hours/day reading articles in LWN and other online sources, the lion's-share of knowledge about what's out there in our line-of-work remains "context-driven" -- if you're not working in it, by-and-large, you're not going to be conversant in it.

Thanks for the "heads-up".