Pegasos II Schematics Released
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 13th Jan 2006 23:02 UTC, submitted by Raffaele
Morphos 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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Only a Schematic
by braddock on Sat 14th Jan 2006 13:08 UTC
braddock
Member since:
2005-07-08

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.

Reply Score: 3

RE: Only a Schematic
by Rasmus on Sat 14th Jan 2006 14:03 in reply to "Only a Schematic"
Rasmus Member since:
2005-11-12

apparently more is coming...

Reply Parent Score: 1

RE: Only a Schematic
by Raffaele on Sat 14th Jan 2006 22:59 in reply to "Only a Schematic"
Raffaele Member since:
2005-11-12

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).

Reply Parent Score: 2

RE[2]: Only a Schematic
by jonas.kirilla on Sun 15th Jan 2006 13:05 in reply to "RE: Only a Schematic"
jonas.kirilla Member since:
2005-07-11

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?

Reply Parent Score: 1