CodeSmith wrote:
Although OF is a pretty good idea, you're a bit limited in the gfx cards that you can use (ie "Mac" gfx cards), and they are usually more expensive. It might be a good idea to add a UBoot driver to AROS, so you can have both. With UBoot you can use cheap "PC" gfx cards (it's got a built-in x86 emulator so the card's BIOS can run on that). Since it's on SourceForge (or if not, should be by the time AOS4 is released), it should not be too difficult to find out what you need.
It depends on the OF, obviously; whoever wrote Genesi's has included support, so far as I know. The question will be whether IBM follows suit, or decides these are destined for the datacenter anyway, and don't make such concessions.
The 'rack/deskside model' would have to have a graphics option of some form - either a generic onboard chipset, if it's a pricey pizza box, or a high-end solution if it's designed for visualization work. (I'd be most surprised to see a high-end 'consumer' chipset, but the PPC division *have* collaborated with a certain ATI in the recent past...)
Also, as far as I know, there's not much stopping the appropriate emulator (or just direct driver code) from running in software. Apple doesn't want to do it because it's a kludge, and would further discourage vendors from producing Mac versions of their product ('Works with Mac!' shelf presence is an important advertising tool, as always)... but if you don't mind keeping the original card in for the first display/boot-time diagnostics/OF-hacking-or-poking-with-sticks, I don't think there's any barrier to firing up a 'generic' Wintel card after/while the OS loads. (Seriously, anyone know if this works under, say, YellowDog or Debian kernels on a Mac? I could swear it does.)
If it ends up PCI-X and AGPless, as many 'server' boards are appearing these days, it's not like you'll lose much of anything picking one slot over another. (As an example,
here's an Opteron board with a diagram of its slot layout.)
Now, the question is whether OS4, or MOS for that matter, will have SMP support worth the port...