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San Mehat goes to work for VA Research 63

Posted by Hemos from the coming-down-the-coast dept.
The little bird flitted in and told me that San Mehat has left Corel to go work for VA Research. One of his cool projects is getting Linux into the bios. Man, VA seems to be collecting all the fun people.
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San Mehat goes to work for VA Research More

San Mehat goes to work for VA Research

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  • http://www.varesearch.com/aboutva/h istory/index.html [varesearch.com]


    VA Research is based in Mountain View California (why the heck is it called VA Research? Anyone know?)

    Some tech firms actually headquartered in Virginia: AOL, Circuit City...umm maybe someone can come up with some better examples :).

  • I would suspect two things:

    1) VA may be thinking of coming out with a competitor to the Cobalt Qube. Think Netwinder except perhaps Intel-powered (considering VA's connections with Intel).

    2) VA may be thinking of coming out with their own motherboards for (choose one) laptop, high-end server, or diskless workstation, and needs someone expert in BIOS issues to make the BIOS part work.

    Please note that I have no real idea what VA is up to, for obvious reasons (I don't work for them!). Just that those would be why *I* would want to hire him, if I had the R&D budget to do so.

    -- Eric
  • Looks like they contracted one instead. See the press releases earlier about VA outsourcing the manufacture of most of their systems.

    -- Eric
  • Posted by tahmed:

    OH MY GOD... My friend Kevin from CISCO who reads this place (he's at CISCO in Ottawa) told me about this discussion. What a small world. San's like one of my best friends, he's staying with me, moved here on Wednesday. Right now he's looking for a "Melrose Place" like pad and starts work on Monday (they hooked him up with a crazy ass computer, quad proc Xeon).

    For you people who don't know.. Ottawa is Canada's
    capital city.. Not Toronto!! Like anyone cares :)
  • Oh come on.

    Chris
    Evangelist, VA.
    --
    Grant Chair, Linux Int.
    VP, SVLUG

  • Actually, I was saying:

    "Oh C'mon", to the VA==compaq comment. Sorry if you misunderstood. And I assure you that I am a "real" Linux user.

    I don't even own a mac!

    It's funny that you thought I was a mac person though.

    Chris DiBona VA Research.

    Grant Chair, Linux International


    --
    Grant Chair, Linux Int.
    VP, SVLUG

  • Yeah, that's one of the things that maks San's eyes get all glazed.

    Chris
    --
    Grant Chair, Linux Int.
    VP, SVLUG

  • We have a supply chain Fascist (just kidding Dan!), he's profiled on the web site under executive team, look under vp of manufacturing. This is exactly the kind of thing that he does address.

    Chris


    --
    Grant Chair, Linux Int.
    VP, SVLUG

  • Yep, we have Flex doing the manufacturing of a number of our lower end systems. They rock, they also build Cicso routers. But thanks, eric.

    Chris


    --
    Grant Chair, Linux Int.
    VP, SVLUG

  • V and A were the initials of the two founders. One I have forgotten, but the A was for Larry Augustin.
    --
  • And it has been done in the netwinder, and I wouldn't be surprised if San did it :-)

    You have the nettrom+rescue image, which boots a full linux system from the EEPROM. Ok, full is a bit too much, but it is enough to do a full reinstall of the OS over a network without having to set NFS root.

    I must confess I have never used it, because I had a tftp/kernel NFS/root setup already configured, but anyway, it still sounds really cool.

    The netwinder can boot almost out of a used chewing gum :-)
  • How about, "Your momma, the Monica Lewinsky of Linux"?
    Beer recipe: free! #Source
    Cold pints: $2 #Product
  • The Netwinder has a 1M flash memory containing a Linux kernel and an intelligent boot-loader that lets you choose a kernel and root device to boot from (this can be from a local disk or over the network). While LILO can only find a kernel by knowing its physical location on a disk, the Netwinder boot manager mounts a partition and looks for the kernel by name. There's a lot of other cool things that can be done with decent firmware; I'd be glad to see yet another bit of legacy x86 baggage go on the scrap heap.

  • Who is San Mehat? Sorry, but I have never heard this name before...

  • Gabor Kuti is working on a portable suspend-to-disk feature. Homepage a href="http://falcon.sch.bme.hu/~seasons/linux/swsu sp.html ">here.

  • This brings up an interesting point: Is there a way to compile a ROMable kernel? I mean, one that can execute directly from ROM, rather than loading it into RAM? I know there are writable strings and, of course, allocated RAM, but one could move them into RAMspace.

    Come to think of it, you'd have to:

    1. make an image of a just-loaded kernel
    2. Isolate all the potentially-writable chunks
    3. Find all the pointers to those chunks
    4. Create a memory image holding all those writable chunks
    5. rewrite the pointers in the kernel to point at the memory image once it is loaded into the bottom of RAM
    6. Write a loader that copies the memory image into RAM, then starts the kernel
    7. Burn loader, memory image and kernel into a ROM and try it out. (Thank Bog for 1MB flash!)

    Whew! That's gonna be REEEEAL easy.

    Me, I'd like to see a kernel that uses kmodd to reduce boot-up time by delaying device init until the device is needed. We should see initrd bootups in the 1-sec range.

  • the Netwinder boot manager mounts a partition and looks for the kernel by name
    Both GRUB and the FreeBSD bootloader will do the same thing.
  • VA---the Compaq of Linux
    Redhat---The Microsoft of Linux

    If I were working for either VA or Red Hat, I'd find these comparisons really quite insulting.

  • Try

    UUNet
    MCI/WorldCom
    RoadRunner (cable modem)
    PSINet

    and a world of Beltway Bandits ( Governement Leeche^H^H^H^H^H Contractors, can you say SAIC?)
  • Zaphod! San, did you name that after Zaphod Beeblebrox!?! Other than the novel, Zaphod's is
    a bar here in Ottawa that I used to and I believe San still frequents.

    San! We still didn't get together for that lunch! shoot me an email if you see this!
  • This can only be a good thing, I would like to have better firmware tools, like on my sparcs where I can run scsi-probe and other useful things, or the hinv on the SGI systems. The PC bios has always seemed less full-featured then other unix workstations.
  • Sure, the more they resemble Sun, SGI, and the other commercial Unix vendors. Also, the more they resemble most large PC vendors.

    But changing the BIOS won't necessarily mean you lose standard hardware, just that you have a custom bios in flash. And that's easy to replace.
  • You can set your laptop to go into suspend mode. So you stop what you are doing, suspend, and later turn it on right back to where you were...

    Cheers,
    Ben Tilly
  • What exactly does "getting linux into the bios"
    mean? Hardware compatability factors? Booting
    options to do away with lilo, etc? Do we even
    *use* the PC BIOS after booting? (I thought we
    did not...)
  • That would kick serious butt. I (and many others I know) would probably buy those by the six-pack.
  • Delivering correctly configured computers on time (a noted VA weakness) is probably a bigger issue to address.

    Once Dell starts shipping linux, VA is going to be in big trouble unless they become more fascist about delivering the right product on time.
  • San was one of Corel Computer Corporation's engineers. I've met him a couple times at Linux Expo's. He's a really cool guy. He was responsible for a lot of work with the Netwinder, firmware and I believe hardware too. It seems to me that since CCC was bought by Canadian Hardware Solutions the Netwinder has sort of stagnated. After all I was excitedly awaiting the unvailing of the Zaphod which was San's baby at the Atlanta Linux Show Case and that never became a product.

    The Zaphod was to be a 10 NW Beowulf system in its own case. Would have made a hell of a good ERP hardware platform with the numeric processing and network throughput. The redundancy it would have offered would have been grand too. Never really happened though.

    I'll be flying my NW at half mast today.

    But I'm sure San will be happy at VA.
  • As in BIOS??
    A firmware Linux?
  • I can see it now:
    Instant-on Linux boxes, no more looking at clouds or little dots walking on the screen.
    FlashEEPROM OS that finishes the comparison test before the 'other' OS is even done booting.
    Mmmm - warm fuzzies all over.
  • That's the best spanking I've seen since I last visited San Francisco.

    Well done, mr Natural.
  • Well, VA is backed, in part, by Intel. Intel motherboards ave 4 megabit flash memory for the firmware.

    That is certainly enough room for a decent boot loader, some diagnostics and some decent remote boot firmware. Not quite enough for a compressed kernel, I don't think, but an 8 megabit flash might be.
  • If I'm not mistaken I saw an alpha that had MILO flashed into the bios at the linux general store. Not for sale. Someone had just done it.
  • Actually, Apple is going the opposite way. The newer machines have a smaller boot rom and load
    a file containing all of the stuff that used to be in the rom. Maybe there's a convergence here... the traditional PC BIOS is too brain-dead, and the Mac had too much stuff (GUI code) in the ROM.
  • It makes me happy that they can get the biggest shots to work for them. More power to 'em.
  • This is one of the ugliest areas of PC architecture. One reason doing this in a generic way is non-trivial is that each laptop mfr. does it differently. With APM and ACPI (not in Linux yet, so far as I know) there are fianlly decent hooks into suspend-to-ram, but suspend-to-disk is still done in many different ways: some use regular fils in the FS, some use dedicated partitions, some can use a combination (Dell), and many also require a special program (never documented) to prepare the S2D target area. Combine this with the fact that different BIOSes handle this differently (although APM/ACPI helps a lot) and you understand why we have problems with this.

    Oh, and then there's the point that BIOS functionality is pretty much controlled by MS now, at least for the big OEMs, since a decent MS discount structure is contingent on PC9x compliance - if you haven't looked at these standards lately, it's an eye-opener to see what MS is dictating to the PC OEMs. They will not hesitate to use this power to make life very difficult for Linux or any other challenger.

    San did a great job on the NetWinder BIOS kernel - I wish him well at VA - we are all saddened by the demise of CCC, but it will be interesting to see if his Linux kernel boot monitor/BIOS can make the transition into the x86 world.
  • Dude, the last I heard, MCI was still based out of Cedar Rapids, IA. That's where it was born and blossomed. I didn't think they would move it. If so, I will stand corrected. I lived in CR, IA for a while, there's a lot of telemarketing and telecom in amongst the corn.
  • Cool idea, but from the standpoint of somebody who needs his machines to be up 24-7, I want standard, off-the-shelf hardware inside my server's case. I want to be able to replace any and all hardware within a couple of hours. The more VA Research deviates from standard PC hardware, the more they resemble Sun, SGI, and the rest of the commercial UNIX vendors.

  • I must have been chatting to him on IRC on and
    off for a year or two. It only clicked once I
    saw the COMDEX reports on NetWinder who he was.

    I still have yet to see Linux actually running on
    StrongARM. I believe it's quite smart.
  • Sheesh, San, have a little modesty!
    -russ
    p.s. I *still* owe San lunch.

  • 1) VA may be thinking of coming out with a competitor to the Cobalt Qube. Think Netwinder except perhaps Intel-powered (considering VA's connections with Intel).

    Unless something has radically changed, the Netwinders are Intel based, running on the StrongArm chip, which Intel got as part of its massive settlement with Digital before Digital was bought by Compaq.

  • Sorry, Chris. I saw the Evangelist title, and coupled with what appeared to be more knee-jerk pooh-poohing of a PC's abilities, I bit. I guess I've faced enough subscribers to the evangelist that the snappy comebacks are hard to stop! I am offended by people who on one hand want to be as cool as Linux, but on the other think of things like like compiling a custom kernel a Bad Thing.

    Thanks for taking it in good humor. I did rest well that night!

  • I myself live in richmond va. i used to think this place was madd boring and had nothing more than a bunch of hicks but it has really grownup technologically.
  • Yup, we all hung out last night. I have to say he's one of the most intelligent and gifted computer people I know. I can't even begin to expand. The guy is incredibly on the edge of technology all the time, and never ceases to amaze me in his technical abilities -- and we've known him almost 10 years.

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