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.

Comments

The real benefit

[Rayban]

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.

this would save me seconds a week!

[azuretongue]

Well as much as I hate the time that it takes to boot, I can't remember the last time that I had to.

Re:Explain to stupid: Why faster?

[Anonymous Freak]

Quite simply: The OS loads without the normal 'POST' routine present on a standard PC.

In detail: When your PC starts up, the very first thing it does is go to the ROM (or PROM, or EEPROM, or FlashROM...) for the BIOS, and run the Power On Self Test. This is the routine that tests the processor(s) and memory, then initializes the PCI bus, initializes your IDE bus, and runs any Option ROMs on any add-in cards. On my home computer, this process (with memory test DISabled) takes about 2 minutes. (Yes, I have lots of OpROMs.) Unfortunately, most modern OSes (Linux included) do not use the BIOS. They access hardware directly, without ever speaking to the BIOS. So, once the BIOS has done it's job, your OS loads, and pushes the BIOS out of the way.

What Linux BIOS does: It completely does away with your old BIOS and goes immediately to the OS (Linux.) This means no POST, no PCI initialization, no OpROM scan. Because Linux doesn't talk to the BIOS anyway, it isn't needed. Now, the difficulty lies in the fact that you have this miniscule space (1MB on an Intel L440GX+) to hold the system. Plus, they are having difficulties getting some of the onboard hardware to function properly. (Linux DOES like to have the PCI bus initialized for it beforehand, which isn't happening with the old BIOS gone.)

Some of the benefits include:

• Of course, boot speed. You can be at your login prompt less than two seconds after applying power to the system.
• Compatibility. Once they get all the bugs worked out, you don't have to worry about BIOS incompatibility anymore. Since Linux is controlling the system from power-on, you have full Linux stability at all times.
• Boot options. Because you could use this to boot to another OS rather than just running Linux, you can choose any device on the system to boot from. Want to boot from that third network card? You can. Want to boot from a SCSI tape drive on the third SCSI bus? You can. You can boot from absolutely any I/O device you want, including the serial port if you felt like it...

Hopefully this gives you a little more info on why this is much better than just being able to skip the memory test... ;-)

How about a nice ROM Monitor instead?

[IGnatius T Foobar]

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?

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 ... but in reality, nobody uses any of it anymore, except the little bit required to chain-load into a 32-bit OS.

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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