"The GIGABYTE M57SLI-S4 is the first-ever desktop motherboard supported by a Free & Open Source BIOS, thanks to AMD engineer Yinghai Lu who released GPL-licensed code last month. This state-of-the-art motherboard is based on the NVIDIA nForce 570 SLI chipset and AMD's latest Socket AM2." I am not exactly a Free Software evangelist, but I am a strong proponent of open BIOS, for various reasons. Good thing, this.
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Member since:2005-07-06
I suppose that to have such small time, you have to disable memory checking done by the board (*)..
IMHO you should precise that the time you're measuring is the time of the initialisation of the board itself
(I think), to measure the boot time you still need to add the startup of the rest..
Still 8s is nice, I remember that on my old Celeron333 (128Mo of RAM), BeOS started under 20s but the board itself took >30s to initialise!
So 30s->8s is nice for the board, but now Linux (kernel+KDE) takes >1min to boot instead of <20s for BeOS :-( :-(
*: Now that's not necessarily a bad thing as the memory checking done by the BIOS is quite limited, memory checking should really be done in the background continuously, but currently it isn't..
Member since:
2005-11-05
This is a really nice motherboard for bios hackers. In fact, it includes 2 identical bios chips so that if you flash one and brick it, you have a backup one usable to recover your system with. By default, these motherboards use Award BIOS, but it isn't very difficult to flash them with LinuxBIOS. They claim to have gone from poweron to a login prompt in 3 seconds using LinuxBIOS, but I can only get it down to 8 seconds
Maybe some more hacking and I'll get it <5 seconds to a login prompt.