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Pegasos II Schematics Released

  Submitted by Raffaele Morphos 15 Comments

With a delay of a few days, Genesi has released the schematics to its Pegasos Rev.2b5 motherboard. You can download it from here, but you’ll need to sign up (free) on Power.org. They even blogged about it, stating: “If you are just along for the ride you can stop reading now. Your challenge: be the best you can be. That is the competition. We are in the human line that stretches behind and beyond us. We all can have a role to play. To participate we have to start within ourselves, find firm footing, and launch into the world around us.”

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Thom Holwerda

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15 Comments

  1. 2006-01-14 12:22 am
    smitty_one_each

    A box with total hardware transparency?

    The FOSS world should offer ridiculously good word-of-mouth advertising to this effort.

  2. 2006-01-14 12:23 am
    Wes Felter

    Only they could make an obsolete motherboard sound like some sort of heroic epic.

  3. 2006-01-14 12:31 am
    Jed

    I’ve been a big fan of the Pegasos PPC for quite some time. I about 1 months time I will be the proud owner of an ODW. ;)

  4. 2006-01-14 12:34 am
    Morty

    It’s looks kind of interresting, perhaps I’ll take a look at it some day. Until then I’m more curious about the license on the thing, you know stuff like that matter when it comes to hardware too. IP contamination and such, never know if you have to do a PPC design one of these days. The only thing I could find looking, was in the mentioned blog. But it only states “Open Source Hardware (Almost!)”, which is not really helpfull. Have anyone registered and found out?

    Edited 2006-01-14 00:37

    • 2006-01-14 3:10 am
      Rasmus

      “Almost” referred to the time not what was released. The schematics are what they are and they are all there. Impressive. We are still going through them. The pin-outs for the CPU card and GigE connector are included. In any case no one has ever done this.

      Rasmus

  5. 2006-01-14 11:21 am
    Raffaele

    Thank you dear Thom Holwerda for you signalled the fact that first batch of schematics of Pegasos are now available.

    However this is not the news I submitted, and you also pointed to the blog of Bill Buck and Raquel Velasco that I didn’t even knew of it, neither considered it (at the time I submitted whole affair).

    Also I pointed the fact that with completely Open Source Hardware there could be these scenarios:

    1) A strict joint with Linux developers and other Open Source developers is now possible.

    2) Open Source technicians could now modify Pegasos motherboard and upgrade it.

    3) Resellers could hire manufacturers to produce batches of Pegasos Motherboards, without paying any fee to Genesi.

    4) Gropus of customers could now join and collect funds to hire manufacturers (In Europe, USA, or Far East [China, Taiwan, South Corea]) for producing small quantities of motherboards.

    Honey, That is really Silicon On Demand.

    5) Power users can even produce their special-bodied pumped-up motherboards.

    So please, the news as you forwarded, for the fact that you modeled it all, are all yours.

    I leave you all the honour for had posting that.

    Then, please remove: «submitted by Raffaele» statement.

  6. 2006-01-14 1:08 pm
    braddock

    This is only a schematic, as far as I can tell. The real art with modern mobo high-speed design is in the layout. Reference design schematics are very often made available for free from chip producers, since they DO want to encourage you to use their chips. The pinouts on modern digital chips are not really that mystereous; it is the internal firmware or logic that kills designers or Open Source driver developers.

    IBM had open-sourced their “Yellow-Knife” PPC motherboard design many years ago, and a few of us in the old OpenPPC project quickly discovered that the schematics are not even one fifth of the battle.

    Last year I did a commercial DSP board design, and the FCC certification took a lot longer than the schematic.

    • 2006-01-14 2:03 pm
      Rasmus

      apparently more is coming…

    • 2006-01-14 10:59 pm
      Raffaele

      Mr Braddock wrote:

      >it is the internal firmware or logic that kills

      >designers or Open Source driver developers.

      This shouldn’t be a relevant problem.

      Internal firmware of Pegasos motherboard is SMART FIRMWARE, a firmware inspired by OPEN FIRMWARE, and it follows same guidelines.

      So it there should be no difficulty to port BSD version of Open Firmware to Open Pegasos layout (since the moment it will be completely made open to public).

      • 2006-01-15 1:05 pm
        jonas.kirilla

        Think of it as a kernel with device drivers. It provides a simplified view of hardware, so the bootloader/OS doesn’t need to know all the specifics. The firmware, however, does. It’s not a monolithic silver bullet.

        So, has the firmware been released, complete with board-specific routines for CPU/cache/memory/chipset initialization, disk/network/IO drivers, etc?

        The only open OF implementation that I know of is the one released by IBM, for their JS20 blades. (64bit unlike the Pegasos; work needed) It needs those board-specifics implemented, AFAIK.

        http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-expert5/?ca=…

        I’d be surprised if Genesi could open-source Smart Firmware, as it’s not their code, AFAIK, but property of CodeGen. They could probably open their Pegasos-specific Forth/C/asm code, for use with the SLOF, but have/will they?

  7. 2006-01-15 1:30 pm
    aliquis

    Uhm, the VIM project started on Amiga, so the best editor is of course vim.