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Linux BIOS
An anonymous reader pointed us to the Linux Bios Project
which (surprise) is aiming to make a Linux Kernel BIOS. Its got numerous bugs, but some boards are booting. Interesting stuff, and has the potential to dramatically reduce boot time.
Shaving ten to thirty seconds off your boot time just doesn't sound that epic to me. Heck, you can save three to ten seconds by just setting the type to "none" for any nonexistent IDE devices (Secondary Slave, whatever).
What WOULD be really useful and cool would be to have a much faster and more configurable SCSI BIOS inside the system BIOS so my 29160N wouldn't take a week to get itself together... Especially if I could tell it only to scan for new devices when I've actually added something, manually, perhaps by pressing a key at the right (prompted) moment or something.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Why would LinuxBios be faster than a normal one? It seems that the memory check seems to take most of the time on my machines... I'd assume there's some setup that Windows uses that Linux doesn't that could be scrapped, but I don't know any specifics.
Could someone post some specifics of the kind of things that could go, or that would be faster with LinuxBIOS?
Every second generation PowerMac (7500,7600, 7300, 8500, 8600, 9500, 9600 and newer) have an OpenFirmware bootrom.
And most PCI-video, SCSI and other cards for the Mac have an OpenFirmware bootrom.
- You may put in whatever soundcard you want, from the cheapest to the most expensive
- You may use whatever Network Interface Card you want, BNC/RJ45/Tokenring/Fiber/...
- You may put in as many HD as you want (Hmmm usually at most 4)
- You may use IDE or SCSI for your CD-ROM, CD-R,...
- ...
But also, you may put on it any OS you want, MS Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, BeOS,... And the piece of software that allows that is the BIOS.So I don't think that putting Linux directly in the BIOS is a good thing. It's only limiting the machine.
But using a linux variant that fulfit all previous BIOSes functions and adds some things like NFS boot, multitask for 16bit OSes (DOS, whatever version it is), PnP, drivers for WinModems making them usable under any OS not disabling the BIOS, FB drivers,... That would be great. And many of these functions are already implemented in Linux (sometimes partially or with extra-patches).
The linux kernel on BIOS can still be used as fallback, if there are no OS present, like the BASIC ROM was in earlier PC. Maybe there can even be reusable parts between these two. That would allows for that cluster system to be built.
I should however recognize that this project has to be started somewhere... And making the BIOS being the Linux kernel is a begin to it... But I think that it should not be the ultimate goal...
I don't think it's a good idea to have to reflash the BIOS for every kernel update, without forgetting that a bad flashing may make the PC useless.
Many benifits... fast booting and improved functionility and just plain getting away from legacy design (After all Linux is Unix based not CP/M based... )
One other is upgrading the BIOS.
The reason we HAVE flash BIOS is so we can upgrade it ourselfs. Upgrade to what?
New features are likely to tie more and more into Windows. Why bother.
But with this new features will be for Linux not Windows.
Finnaly when Linux PCs are built you are still paying someone for a BIOS. In many cases they are still making BIOS with MsDos in mind.
Now instead Linux PC makers can preinstall something made with Linux in mind...
I'm still hoping someone makes a software shutdown powersuply for the desktop PC...
The PS button only applys power... when off this turns the computer on... when on this sends a signal to the computer to turn off... the software then runs shutdown and then sends a signal to the powersuply telling it to accually turn off...
(I believe this allready happend so on laptops.. but this function is't passed to desktops becouse it isn't considered useful... however this is how the 3B2 works.. no real off switch just an on switch that tells the OS to shutdown)
I don't actually exist.
The real benefit is not necessarily to reduce the boot time to Linux - it's to enable greater functionality in the bootloader that would bootstrap the real Linux installation. Imagine being able to netboot on any card without having to flash a NIC EEPROM! You could also boot from Zip, CD-ROW, DVD or a number of other things. Imagine having a password-protected root prompt available at boot...
The possibilities are endless. I hope this one takes off.
æeee!
For a while now, I have been following discussions on OpenBIOS to see what they could come up with. Very impressive, really. OpenBIOS and LinuxBIOS have been sharing for some time. The big reason for it is even simpler than booting faster or putting cool things in your BIOS like graphics (which, I must admit, is cool): The project is about having a system truly free of proprietary software. Feel free to join in and contribute to either project; in the true spirit of Opensource, they share, so helping one will help the other. Ultimately, I would like to see a package that will help sysadmins customize and install thier own bios. Also, lets see Intel try and pull the serial# off a machine that has the serial#'s memory location specifially blocked off in the bios... See? The reasons for doing this go on and on. It's a new frontier in Open Source. How can anyone call themselves a hacker when they depend on Phoenix or Award to turn thier computer on for them?
Drop me a line at:
Key ID: 0x54D1D809
This would be interesting... is it the first time an BIOS-OS has been attempted on the PC? I'm curious.
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Well as much as I hate the time that it takes to boot, I can't remember the last time that I had to.
Has it occurred to anyone that if computer and computer component designers and manufacturers would quit trying to support Microsoft (non-)operating systems, then we'd have thumbnail- sized supercomputers?
Also, how much faster would Transmeta have finished Crusoe if they didn't have to compensate for the 16 (8?) bit code that Microsoft uses? (And how much better would the chip be?)
I'm still waiting for my 1600x1200 contact lens.
How about a pointer to the Forth port of Pong for OpenFirmware? I'd give that a shot.
I already know all about Linus and how he was born in a log cabin in Finland and his mom and drap scraped to save enough to send him to college where he got into a newsgroup shouting match with Andy Tanenbaum while working on Linux.
I have already read his BIOS. Why do I need to read it again?
Sheesh.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
Fast booting: This is the point I best noted. Just think being able to replace all major A/V equipment in your house with linux boxes. Once they boot as fast as normal equiptment and we can already have them mount a ro filesystem for quick shutdown, my god it will be beautiful. I can't wait to be able to telnet to any A/V in my house. Use TCP/IP to create a electorinic system which can talk to each other. I.E. when my computer starts playing a CD or mp3 automatically mute my TV and turn on CC.
I can hardly wait.
That's a good point. Can anyone with LinuxPPC and x86 experience here compare/contrast their ideas with Open Firmware?
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Well, if you read the information on the page, that is exactly what they are trying to get around.
they are replacing the bios with an image of the kernel, so that we aren't dealing with this "sudo-OS".
something you also learn when you read the page, is that they start in 16 bit mode (as required by the cpu) and then about immediatly jump to 32 bit mode, gunzip the linux image, and run with it..
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Actually, they are doing this so their cluster nodes can get boot instructions from the network.
For instance,
"Hi. I'm computer #42 - how should I boot?"
"Hello computer #42. Boot diskless, and mount / to blah..blah..blah.."
But you know this since you read the page before posting.
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IA-64 boxes are going to have a workstation-PROM-like system as a replacement for the BIOS, called EFI. It can read FAT filesystems, run its own programs to do fdisk, format etc. I'm not sure how extensible it is, to read other file systems etc, but it's certainly a huge step up from the BIOS.
Again, this project is booting Linux right now and is in active development by a paid staff. It's just gonna get better. :}
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Hand me that airplane glue and I'll tell you another story.
Heretical though it may be, some of us run Win95 for games and Linux for anything serious. Is it possible to do a multiboot BIOS that could boot Linux and Windows (and BSD and Solaris and BEOS) with equal efficiency?
The Second Amendment Sisters
Finding God in a Dog
Imagine having even the boot block and swap partition encrypted.
Mike
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
Could you shrink the code such that you don't need a hard drive on your firewall? Just turn the power on and your ready to go -- the thing is up in seconds. Maybe this would be nice in a beowulf cluster (no I am not trolling here!) No need for hard drives, floppies or even moniters. All you need is a bunch of motherboards with on-board ethernet.
At work we have an old 486 that is hooked up to our Fourier transform spectrometer. The code to do the FFT is in the bios. The the code is totally optimized it is quite fast for a 486 -- as you can imagine the device is a couple of years old but it still works. Might be nice to be able to set up a pc to do one thing well like that.
Slashdot already has a rather large Linux BIAS.
I think alot of people are missing the point of the project.. It's not about speed, although that's a neat side effect. It's about being able to pull boot instructions from a network without the limitations of the technologies that already do that. Look far down on the page.. they have a section called "Why we are doing this.." It's not a speed thing..
wish
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I saw this yesterday on ./ and discussed it with my office neighbor. There are significant advantages here.
1. Like a Sun box, console output could be directed to serial. This is important when you are running a box as a server and want to debug the boot process. (Hey, can we get a diag-mode too?)
2. My neighbor sells pcs that are specifically designed to broadcast audio/video over the net using linux. They are very much appliances, as they just need to be plugged in and a few questions answered (IP info). This BIOS could allow him to tailor the boot environment to the specific hardware he has included.
3. Security: I believe you could require a password/login in order to boot a linuxBIOS machine. This could make my laptop worthless to a thief who doesn't have an NVRAM burner.
There are other things we came up with, but I've only got a few minutes.
_damnit_
_damnit_
It's my job to freeze you. -- Logan's Run
a QBasic BIOS
:) The original IBM PC had BASIC in ROM. Turn on the machine without a hard drive and without a disk in the floppy drive and you received a BASIC prompt. The Commodore 64, Apple II, and later Atari machines (XL and XE models) were the same way, dating back to the seventies in the case of the Apple.
Ah, a yung 'un
http://www.machack.com/Hack98.html
It's called OFPong.
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$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Which might actually make those Dual BIOS motherboards (I have one in my PC at work) useful. You don't often screw up your BIOS these days, and most settings can be autodetected, not like the old days of recording Landing Zones and all sorts of esoterica. But if you're regularly reflashing, could be a lifesaver :)
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
linuxbios boots into 32-bit protected mode as soon as possible, so that we can write as much code as possible in 32-bit C, compiled with gcc.
And there are also people who run Windows/Intel machines that would find a winBIOS a good thing, especially people buying a new computer that have no idea what the BIOS is anyways.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
You have one in your computer now. If you need to boot OSes (And I use that term loosely) that require BIOS, stick to that. Windows 95/98 users are out of luck. NT probably doesn't need a BIOS but it probably wouldn't like this one either, knowing NT. YMMV with OS/2, BeOS, etc.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Yep, but those BIOSs where not open source.
You could get a listing of the Atari ROM OS from Atari in the Technical Reference Notes. A full, commented source listing. Neat! You could also get the full source to Atari DOS, with lots of commentary, in the book "Inside Atari DOS" (only $12.95).
All that baggage is even more painful for them then it is for the rest of us, because they're the ones that gt shouted at when things don't work. Microsoft does indeed want the BIOS to become a thing of the past. Count on it.
(Maybe this was part of IBM's plan all along? Yeah, right...)
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
FYI - Microsoft's pages for "Legacy-free" PCs and BIOSes: http://www.microsoft.com/hwdev/newpc/
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Going backward in time, through PCs alone:
What I want in a BIOS is
It seems to me that Open Firmware is a good contender and starting point. It is already fairly widely used, it is programmable, and it seems to work fairly well. One of the nicer features is that it is actually programmable (in Forth) and provides full access to the machine. So, you can load extensions (e.g., new partitioning schemes) into it easily and portably. I believe there is an open source project trying to create an Open Firmware implementation for PCs (I can't find the link, though).
And on any x86 machine using framebuffer console.
One thing to note is that it will give you multiple penguins, one for each processor. I've seen several people freak out when I start the SMP and there are four.. (As if the freaking when POST keeps going past 128M, then 256M, then past 512M wasn't bad enough!)
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Seriously, this BIOS stuff has got to go. Nobody uses 16-bit operating systems anymore; why are we still booting 32-bit (and soon 64-bit) operating systems using a 16-bit BIOS?
... but in reality, nobody uses any of it anymore, except the little bit required to chain-load into a 32-bit OS.
Non-PC platforms all have nice, simple ROM Monitors with simple, straightforward methods of loading the operating system kernel and then getting out of the way. On the PC, we have this gargantuan pseudo-OS that carries all sorts of legacy crud with it to support MS-DOS
This is one of those things that make the PC a 'fundamentally broken' architecture. Until things like this get changed, there will always be a delineation between PC's and 'real computers'.
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Will this lead to the introduction of silly little "Designed for GNU/Linux" stickers to replace the silly little "Designed for Windows 98/NT" stickers?
Christopher A. Bohn
cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?
At Rebel.com, we've had this kind of bios in the NetWinder since day 1. The original idea belongs to nettwerk (who's at VA now). The idea was that we wanted the NetWinder to be able to boot from: disk, zip drive, tftp, nfs or parallel-port-cdrom. The kernel knows how to do all that, so why not make a bios out of the kernel. PatB
But I liked Kickstart. Even if the graphics were cruddy. :)
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
on SourceForge.
It's still crude (we're working on it)- but it is booting Linux _right_ _now_ on SiS530 chipsets.