OLS: A proposal for a new networking API

Posted Jul 24, 2006 9:39 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313)
In reply to: OLS: A proposal for a new networking API by drag
Parent article: OLS: A proposal for a new networking API

I am a member and went and read the paper.

what they did was to create a pci card that claimed to be a VGA/keyboard/mouse card and remoted that out to another machine via IP (the purpose being to investigate the potential for more 'legacy free' motherboards, including being free of any graphics, keybard, usb, IDE, etc ports)

they found a 40-60% performance hit for doing so, but point out that normal sysadmin tasks don't use these channels so it was deemed acceptable.

while this is a very interesting idea for server manufacturers (and performance can be improved with a custom ASIC instead of the slow FPGA)it's of much less interest for home use (where you don't normally have another machine to serve as the head for your systems, and gamers aren't willing to sacrafice any performance)

while an interesting paper it doesn't seem to be very relavent to the issues being dicussed here.

Old news?

Posted Aug 4, 2006 5:36 UTC (Fri) by ringerc (subscriber, #3071) [Link]

I'm fairly sure I've seen cards on the market that do exactly that - and have for a while. The IBM RSA (Remote Supervisor Adapter) comes to mind, and I think Dell do something similar for their servers.

(By the way: I WANT ONE VERY BADLY. I hate the way x86 servers - even Intel server boards etc - can't handle serial console access for POST and BIOS. It's completely retarded, and one area where Sun has been trouncing `PC' servers for years.).

There are also older approaches, such as the `PC Weasel' VGA+keyboard -> serial console cards that've been around for yonks.

That said, you just wrote a summary, so I'm sure there's more in the details.