Frequent change in motherboard

[Guest]

Hi,

Our product requires a motherboard with 3PCI slots, IDE/SATA, Audio, LAN and
VGA port.

We are using X86 off the shelf motherboards in our product. But these
motherboards are available in the market for a very few period and it become
obsolete after some time. Then we have create image for the next motherboard.
Like initially we used Intel 845GVSR motherboard in our product. Then we
migrated to 915GAVL due to non-avaialability of 845GVSR. After some time
again we migrated to 945GNTL and now this is also not available in the market
and we have to go for the next motherboard like 965GBF etc..

Due to this we had problem in our production line, maintenance and image
maintainability.

We are looking for something that either can we get a standard board for a
period of atleast 3 to 4 years or Can we build a image so that it can be
booted in different motherboards?.

Does Any any of you have facing such kind of issue?. and how you are
managing?.

 

[Richard]

Always find out the availability and the End Of Life Dates before selecting
a board.
Sometimes, using a specific board designated as Industrial or Embedded will
give you 3 years of production.

Other than that, I do not see how you can predict what drivers to use in a
future product, however on new images, you can include the drivers in order
to still support your older boards.

Richard

 

[Rich Noonan]

We are looking for something that either can we get a standard board for a
period of atleast 3 to 4 years or Can we build a image so that it can be
booted in different motherboards?.

I do both. You can build images for multiple boards. Link all
required driver components into the same TD project, build the image
with Reseal Phase set to 0 (System Cloning Tool component), dump image
to disk, now boot it on each mobo you are supporting, then reseal.
Yes, a real PIA, but it does work.

The better option is to use long-life mobo's. There's many
manufacturers and Intel maintains an embedded products list with long-
life components that these builders use (I'm told AMD does same or
similar). Some possible manufacturers include Radisys, iTox,
Advantech.

Final piece of the puzzle is to contract a system builder that will
manage EOL for you, forward PCNs when appropriate, make last time buy
as needed, etc.

Good luck.

-Rich

 

[Nikolai Vorontsov]

Hi Saravanan,

one more note to Rich and Richard's one:

we use image that suits many boards. The main problem is drivers, but if
you stay on Intel chipset, there not so many places to concern:
Video
Sound
Network

Sound changes not so often, so I've added some Realtek drivers and it
suits well.

Network - I know 4 wired NICs brands that are usually used: Intel,
Broadcom, Realtek and Marvell. Luckily they drivers are backward
compatible, so I just added them all and update from time to time in the
released build (without rebuilding in XPe).

Video - nVidia driver (as we uses sometimes external video boards) is
perfectly integrated and suitable for most nVidia cards.
ATi and Intel - they have 3 different drivers and I have to choose one
of those on the fly. I wrote a small application that checks registry
for VEN_xxxx and DEV_xxxx for the video and unpack to the System32 a
necessary driver. Then next reboot machine gets video properly.

So I have to maintain 3 builds (for P3, for P4 and for Xeon based
machines - well, I probably can get rid of P3 and Xeon, as XPeSP2 boots
well on those even if it has different HAL), and I'm quite sure that on
99% of Intel based boards my build will boot and install most of
drivers. Once or two time per year I have to update drivers, but it
takes less than a day.

 

[Michael Archer]

Hi Saravanan,

I have same issue, however if you speak to Intel they have a embedded
division, and can supply product lines with a life cycle up to 5years, that
includes a cpu and mainboard. Your intel partner can help you find the right
people to get products from, and prices would not be much more than normal
distribution channels.

I had almost same problem I used a 845, 865(short time), 915,945, and now
looking ahead 965 but i can get a 945chipset for a longer duration.

PCI slots are getting less and less.

Michael Archer
Technical Director
LJD Digital Security Ltd