Re: motherboards for diskless nodes
At 08:36 AM 3/22/2005, Kurt Keville wrote:
We have been experimenting with (diskless cluster) booting over wireless
with mixed results... you will need a board with a BIOS that supports some
exotic "boot from..." options. For instance, the EPIA boards that MIT
Roofnet uses support booting from USB, INT 18 devices, etc. Of course,
those boards also have a DoC Millenium as their BIOS part, so you may as
well go with LinuxBIOS if diskless booting is a priority. Whether it is
sanguine to boot a WLAN remotely is another matter entirely.
<snip>
Mobos with 802.11 PHY on them and those targeted at computation appear to
be on opposite ends of the server market. That having been said, there is
increasing prism2 support by etherboot.org so maybe some day...
Of course, the Prism 2 chip set is getting pretty old and hoary. Globespan
Virata has really moved on to newer higher integration chipsets, and which
are harder to get useful information about... Marketing & manufacturing
oriented NDAs tend not to be compatible with opensource driver development.
James Lux, P.E.
Spacecraft Radio Frequency Subsystems Group
Flight Communications Systems Section
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mail Stop 161-213
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena CA 91109
tel: (818)354-2075
fax: (818)393-6875
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