Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Photos and Commentary On AMD's PIC

Posted by timothy on from the such-a-cute-box dept.

vincecate writes "I just purchased a brand new AMD PIC which has been on Slashdot and LinuxDevices. I have opened it up and put some pictures and comments on the web. Some interesting things are that the system uses only 8 watts, the Windows CE does not want you installing any software, you can not get to the BIOS settings, and I was not able to boot Linux." (He was able, though, to boot Linux from an IDE device on a mini-ITX system also based on the Geode processor.)

10 of 394 comments (clear)

  1. Linux on PIC by MoxFulder · · Score: 5, Informative

    This article on LinuxDevices discusses the possibility of installing Linux on the PIC.

    --
    My bicyles
  2. Cryptographic BIOS? by reality-bytes · · Score: 5, Informative
    Apparently, the BIOS is designed by General Software for AMD and features a 'cryptographic handshake' between BIOS and O/S.

    The Boot Security Application is a firmware application that establishes trust between platform hardware and the user application, preventing operation of systems compromised by unauthorized tampering with BIOS, OS, or application with cryptographic signatures on all trusted objects.


    This sounds like a horrible lock-in to Windows CE ie: "We only want you to run what we want you to run"

    However, in the same document:

    Supporting both Linux and Windows, the Boot Security Application requires the user application running under Linux or Windows to periodically (as defined by a policy established by the ODM/OEM in the system registry) request security challenges and provide challenge responses, convincing the Boot Security Application, which represents the hardware and firmware, that the application is genuine. Similarly, the Boot Security Application responds to out-of-band challenges as requested by the user application, to convince the user application that it is running on genuine hardware and firmware.


    So it now looks more like; "You can run another O/S but only if all the software is registered with us first"

    The first line of attack with getting Linux running on an AMD PIC would appear to be by simply contacting General Software and asking if they are willing to provide some advice (Its worth a try).
    --
    Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
  3. Re:Put ReactOS on it. by Surur · · Score: 4, Informative


    Win CE *is* about $5 a pop, for most applications, including pocketpc's. $5 is not far from free, and Win CE is open source to the OEM's, to modify as they see fit. Further more there are a lot of drivers available for Win CE already, and they get supported by microsoft. Its not too bad a deal.

    And we KNOW microsoft is salivating over getting into the 3rd world cheap computer market before Linux and other free software takes hold, robbing them of future revenue forever.

    Surur

    --
    Information is the location of things. Computation is moving things around.
  4. Beginning reverse engineering by DanMc · · Score: 5, Informative
    I think the first thing to do is take the WinCE drive and put it on a PC and make a 'dd' backup. Poke around, analyze it. Does it have a traditional partition table? dd clone onto a CF disk and see if it boots WinCE in the PIC?

    If there really is a well designed "OS Handshake" to boot, try to work around it. Can you let WinCE complete the handshake, then use something like 'bootlin' to bootstrap linux? I think there was an evolution of bootlin into the windows days but can't recall it's name.

  5. Install LinuxBIOS by LuxuryYacht · · Score: 4, Informative

    LinuxBIOS supports the AMD Geodes. You'd have to do a little hardware hacking (flash in a socket, to allow recovery from a bad LinuxBIOS image) to get the first working image of LinuxBIOS working. After that it's just re-flash and you're up and running with LinuxBIOS!

    www.linuxbios.com

    --
    Quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
    1. Re:Install LinuxBIOS by LuxuryYacht · · Score: 2, Informative

      The above link should be www.linuxbios.org

      LinuxBIOS

      --
      Quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
  6. Re:flash drives and longevity by slide-rule · · Score: 2, Informative

    Depending on whose number you believe, flash drives are good for about 100k writes... not that such a number tells me how long it would last. Anyway, I'm working on a CF-based server, but the CF will be effectively read-only, as the file system will mount into a ram-drive... for what I'm needing, I don't need any additional writes (or I can mount a network drive or something).

  7. Re:flash drives and longevity by The_countess · · Score: 5, Informative

    you can change a bit of a flash drive about 100.000 times. for everyday use this is more then enough but linux changes a lot of things quite often so it wears out relativly quickly. there are however specialy distributions for flash drives that change verry little, and work almost exclusivly in RAM.

  8. Re:Boot problem by kmurray · · Score: 2, Informative

    It looks like the BIOS is using Crypto to lock the OS. Check out the link.
    One of the "Custom Features" the BIOS company did was "Boot Security". Sounds like something the XBOX uses. We'll probably have to wait until someone comes up with a mod chip.

  9. Re:Linux running on this device by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Linspire is free via bittorrent and you can pay $5 a month and download all the apps in the warehouse then quit. You get to keep the apps once you download them even if you quit the warehouse. Therefore, the total cost is $5 for Linspire. Best price for the only Linux that Microsoft worries about.