Current events

LinuxBIOS Summit

Expect more information, such as papers and presentations held at the LinuxBIOS summit 2005 soon.

Richard Bruner, AMD Fellow, was be a featured speaker. We had a number of interesting speakers lined up, and were be describing new developments, such as the use of Linux Kconfig for LinuxBIOS configuration.

Title: AMD's Roadmap for Free Firmware (as in Beer)

Speaker: Rich Brunner, AMD Fellow

Abstract: This will be a discussion of the upcoming AMD Processor roadmap, AMD plans for supporting LinuxBIOS, and AMD's directions for the future of firmware.

Speaker BIO:

Richard A. Brunner is the Software Architect for Advanced Micro Devices' AMD64 Architecture. He is an AMD fellow and is responsible for driving the technical direction of AMD's AMD64 software strategy for operating systems, device drivers, compilers, libraries, OS/firmware interaction, performance optimizations, and 3rd party tools. Richard led AMD's initial involvement into the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) forum.

Richard holds a Masters of Science degree in Computer Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Case Western Reserve University. He holds patents in computer architecture and has presented extensively including Hot Chips, Siggraph, WinHec, Linux Kernel Summit, Linux World, Ottawa Linux Symposium.

Invitation

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Ronald G. Minnich writes:

Just hold these dates: october 11-13, 2005

We've arranged for the lacsi symposium, in santa fe:
http://lacsi.rice.edu/symposium/ to set up 2.5 days 
for a linuxbios summit. The info on the linuxbios track,
hotels, etc. should be on that web page later today 
or tomorrow. We hope to have vendor talks, and
discussions on where we as a community are going
with linuxbios.

The time of year is nice in santa fe, new mexico is
beautiful, the food is great, the hotel is very 
pleasant: do consider coming! We'd like to see all of 
you folks out here.

Vendors on this list, if you have something you'd like 
to talk about, please get back to me.

thanks

ron

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Agenda

We are working on the agenda for LinuxBIOS summit. Here is a draft version. Please give us any suggestion and help you have.

We categorized the attendance into three parties, the vendors, the users and the developers. We hope the three parties can each describe their past experience, outstanding problems and future directions such that these three parties can help each other.

Oct. 11th

The first day will be focus on current status report. We are going to have

Vendor Presentation

1. Richard Bruner from AMD will talk about AMD's plan on LinuxBIOS and their roadmap for their products.

2. LNXI will give us their experience on integrating LinuxBIOS in their cluster products.

3. Terra soft will give us their plan of using LinuxBIOS in their PPC 970 products.

User Experience

Users from Sandia and Los Alamos will talk on their experience of using LinuxBIOS in clusters.

Developer Status Report

Developers will give presentations and hands-on demo of recent development. Topics includes:

1. Dual Core support for AMD K8

2. Cache As Ram support for Intel and AMD processors.

3. Integrating VGA BIOS support in your LinuxBIOS.

Oct. 12th

On the second day we will focus on making LinuxBIOS more friendly for people of the three parties:

User Friendly

1. User Interface: What kind of default payload and/or user interface are we going to use? Do we want it to be command line or menu style?

2. User's Manual.

Developer Friendly

1. KConfig: Josiah England will show us his work on using KConfig to replace the current config tool.

2. Development Model: What is the svn commit and release process?

3. Device Object Model: People still complain about the complexity of the current device model. Can we make it easier to work with? What is the impact of a new config too like #1 on the device model? How are we going to generate PIRQ/ACPI etc. tables?

4. Programmer's Manual.

Vendor Friendly

1. We need to discuss the possibility of signing N-party NDA with vendors for their unreleased products.

2. How can we ensure 3rd party that our code is clean and free of legal trouble?

3. Binary blob and EFI/Tiano Interface. How are we going to play nice with Intel?

Hackathon

If anyone get inspired during the discussion, start implement your idea immediately!!

Oct. 13th

On the third day we will look forward further into the future:

Crazy Ideas

1. FreeFI: Possible name change and official FSF sponsorship.

2. LinuxBIOS as Linux: Ron just doesn't give up his old LinuxBIOS==Linux idea. He will show how he is recycling it.

Homework Assignment

Hey, you had a good time. It is time to do your homework now.

Registration

The registration fee is Registration is $350 until September 5, then $400 until October 5 or on-site.

To register for the LinuxBIOS summit, please go to http://lacsi.rice.edu/symposium/.