“Let’s be honest here. When most of us think of open source and free software, we really aren’t thinking of something flashed to a BIOS ROM chip. And yet when it comes to the Linux BIOS project – that’s exactly what’s happening here. The LinuxBIOS is a project designed to work out any perceived shortcomings from existing BIOS options distributed on today’s motherboards. Started back in 1999, it has been in development steadily for quite some time now.”
I like how that article has loads of javascript pop-up links to IntelliTXT, but not a single link to LinuxBIOS 🙂
http://linuxbios.org
what a waste of time.
Though it wasn’t the most thorough article, I do agree with the author that this is a worthwhile project. It’s odd that more motherboard manufacturers aren’t throwing their weight behind this project. After all, if they could use LinuxBIOS for free, it would save them money. Commercial BIOS manufacturers don’t give away their code for nothing.
Edited 2006-12-25 17:08
If people paid money for non-standard hardware/firmware, then we’d all be using Itanium or something else by now.
LinuxBIOS just isn’t compatable with the old/standard “PC BIOS” (unless some Linux-only boot code with a “PC BIOS compatability layer” counts).
Don’t be fooled by the “1 million machines/users/nodes figures” – as far as I can tell that’s a lot of embedded systems, some beowulf cluster nodes, and not much else.
where is that from? AFAIK, linuxBIOS supports so little boards, that, even combined with OpenBIOS, supports less than even 0.1% of a million board types!
And I’m still waiting for my 2 boards to be supported! This article is really way off!
The real good thing about linux BIOS definitely isn’t security or anything in that regard. Modern BIOSes are too stupid to allow remote exploitation anyway. Its just that open BIOSes allow for upgradability without hardware manufacturer support, and also should be much more stable than proprietry ones (which run horribly because they are hacked together to ship earlier).
Of course, the side effect of an open BIOS is that it fulfills the idea that the computer is the user’s not the manufacturers’. And that, alone, warrants its existance and viability. And that is also the main reason the developers started the project in the first place. Thank you idealists. (and who said idealists are always troublemakers?)
No matter how terribly written the article is, please support linuxBIOS project for it is one of the more useful “ideal” projects. And it can simply Just Work(TM)
Perhaps you didn’t dig enough into it, to learn where the million boards come from.
The system in question is the STPC Consumer. Evidently, this chipset is used in an internet terminal sold in India. It runs LinuxBIOS and Linux.
There are at least one MILLION (1,000,000) of these things in use. I realize that is not much compared to the size of some markets, but had you told me six years ago that one million systems would be using LinuxBIOS in 2005, I don’t think I would have believed you.
You know while I agree with you about the merits of linuxBIOS, I think most people just don’t are about what a BIOS is, let alone if its open or not. Since most people don’t really care for a truly open BIOS, the market will continue to exist in its current form.
P.S. Can linuxBIOS even boot Windows XP? If it can’t then this project is kind of limited even for those people who care openness.
Edited 2006-12-26 07:51
http://linuxbios.org/ADLO
Apparently it can.
The main reason I’d be interested in this is that the Bios on my motherboard (MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum) has issues. It’s got this problem with the quick boot not working, every time I turn it on or do a full reset, it has to count through my memory, and having 3gb of ram kind of takes a while.
LinuxBIOS claims that it only takes 3 seconds from power on to a linux console, how nice would that be?
I wonder though what sort of BIOS options would be there for overclocking etc on LinuxBIOS?
http://linuxbios.org/ADLO
Apparently it can.
Apperently, you didn’t read this page. Here’s some of the highlights:
“What bootloaders work with ADLO?
Currently known to work are:
* LILO
* NTLDR (Windows 2000)
There is no technical reason why it couldn’t work with *BSD, (Free)Dos, and other versions of Windows after some tweaking.
This means that other OSs (like FreeBSD and WindowsXP) currently won’t boot (but it’s expected that they will boot once more of ADLO is implemented).
“Out-of-the box ADLO probally won’t boot unless you are using the exact mainboard that the ADLO project uses”
This means you need to hack ADLO to make it suit your motherboard/chipset (and I guess that there is no hooks in LinuxBIOS that ADLO can use for BIOS shadow control).
Lastly, if you follow the link on that page to WindowsXP information (http://www.missl.cs.umd.edu/winint/index2.html) you’ll see an analysis of what would need to be supported by ADLO to get WindowsXP working (with no indication of which parts are already supported). If you read carefully you’ll see they’re looking into how much doesn’t need to be supported (including ACPI, BIOS32, PnP BIOS, APM, the BIOS data area and the Extended BIOS data area).
If ADLO leaves all of that out it’d be much easier to finish implementing ADLO and (according to that page) WindowsXP should still boot. However, in this case WindowsXP wouldn’t be able to do any power management and may have trouble with device resource usage – I severely doubt it’d be as correct as a standard BIOS unless most of this is included (but including most of it is a major undertaking that would need to be redone for each motherboard).
LinuxBIOS claims that it only takes 3 seconds from power on to a linux console, how nice would that be?
On their home page they do claim it only takes 3 seconds from power on to a linux console. On other pages (e.g. http://linuxbios.org/FAQ#Why_do_we_need_LinuxBIOS_for_cluster_maint…) they claim that 3 seconds is the current record (I assume that’s for a cluster node, not an embedded system, as 3 seconds would be far too slow for the fastest embedded system). This means that the average computer is slower than 3 seconds (and LinuxBIOS could actually be slower than your current BIOS, especially if you’re booting ADLO instead of Linux).
It’d be nice to know where this 3 second record came from too. Imagine a computer with a small amount of RAM, no hard disks and no other devices except for one ethernet card being booted using network boot (with the boot files pre-cached by the server), and no system services running on it. To me, 3 seconds seems too slow for this (and yes, all of this is possible for a node in a cluster)…
i hate to say it but it seems such tallent could be better used. in all likely hood no major distributor will adopt this and the current bios moddel is “good enough”. eventualy it will be replaced with something like EFI but until then is there really anyhting anyone is doing that the current bios model is not suited for?
MadPenguin is powered by FreeBSD?
It will bashed to dead and become DeadPenguin
I’d say EFI is more likely to supplant the BIOS in the long run for the majority of motherboards these days. LinuxBIOS will probably be relegated to low cost motherboards or custom-made motherboards that are developed to be totally free from EFI or BIOS limitations. LinuxBIOS makes sense in some situations, but not all by a long shot.
… I wonder if people will just as happy to use normal non open BIOS’ once Intel+Microsoft get DRM support into the BIOS.
As for me, once I get my hands on a flash burner, I’ll convert my Tyan boards to LinuxBIOS.
– Gilboa
If I had a choice between a current MB with Phoenix/Award bios and a MB with LinuxBios at 1/2 the price I would take the LinuxBios anyday. Some say who cares about the bios anyway – if it provides what Linux needs to boot without paying royalties it’s all good. I don’t care for overclocking nowdays – little gain for reduced stability. Very 90s thing to do.
does it run windows?