LinuxBIOS Gains Steam

solferino writes: "LinuxJournal has a good overview article about linuxBIOS and where it's currently at (hint : moving like a sleek penguin under arctic ice). Why linuxBIOS? To quote from the article "Currently two different interest groups are working on LinuxBIOS: one working on embedded systems and one building large-scale computer clusters. For these applications the legacy x86 firmware is suboptimal." Yes, this was a slashdot story in March this year but this article is relevant for updating the project status and for providing indepth information."

Comments

What LinuxBIOS is NOT

[CatherineCornelius]

The importance of this Linux BIOS project is not that it provides a way of doctoring motherboards so that they will not load Windows (and in any case, such an effort could hardly pose any commercial threat to Microsoft).

Nor is it that the BIOS is free software--there are other open source BIOS projects that can perform a DOS/Windows boot.

It isn't even that LinuxBIOS is suitable for embedded systems--other free BIOS's will support embedded systems and can perform a DOS/Windows boot.

In any case, there's nothing to stop someone writing a DOS/Windows boot loader and booting it from LinuxBIOS.

The point, surely, is that "LinuxBIOS generally weighs in under 64KB and doesn't waste ROM space with unnecessary functionality. Because it isn't a legacy design, LinuxBIOS starts up fast, even without code optimization."

It really just provides a nice slimmed down boot cycle suitable for embedded systems that do not require the PC BIOS baggage. We're not even talking about manufacturers dropping DOS/Windows compatibility, simply one or two equipment providers considering using LinuxBIOS in situations where compatibility is unnecessary and speed to boot is an important factor.

Karma Whoring:

[brad3378]

I'm surprised nobody posted this link yet:

The Linux Bios Homepage

Re:Reminds me of my ? to RMS about a free BIOS

[Scooby Snacks]

If his life is in danger and a medical team chooses to hook him up to one of their systems that runs commercial software, then RMS isn't the guy using it, is he?

Even if he requested to be put on life support, this wouldn't be a contradiction. (More in a moment.)

If you can't find a free BIOS replacement for your motherboard, do you really think it's logical to go on a rampage and refuse to boot up that machine ever again, until it can be replaced with an open-source BIOS? I think not. A reasonable individual would say "Well, either I care enough about this to develop my own BIOS - or I don't."

Actually, how do you think the GNU project started? They didn't toggle front-panel switches to write their first programs. There is a history of the GNU project which has a section which explains this:

Donated computers

As the GNU project's reputation grew, people began offering to donate machines running UNIX to the project. These were very useful, because the easiest way to develop components of GNU was to do it on a UNIX system, and replace the components of that system one by one. But they raised an ethical issue: whether it was right for us to have a copy of UNIX at all.

UNIX was (and is) proprietary software, and the GNU project's philosophy said that we should not use proprietary software. But, applying the same reasoning that leads to the conclusion that violence in self defense is justified, I concluded that it was legitimate to use a proprietary package when that was crucial for developing free replacement that would help others stop using the proprietary package.

But, even if this was a justifiable evil, it was still an evil. Today we no longer have any copies of Unix, because we have replaced them with free operating systems. If we could not replace a machine's operating system with a free one, we replaced the machine instead.

Re:BIOSes should not be operating system-specific.

[jquirke]

As a side note, it doesn't look like it would be all that hard to get *BSD or The HURD booting from LinuxBIOS

Just want to point out the differences in the BSD and Linux booting process.

Linux has a 16-bit slab of code that does all the BIOS calls in arch/i386/boot/setup.s. This code works out the memory requirements (does the E820 map), gets any paramaters about any hard disks, APM,etc. Some of the information it finds out may or may not be used. Then it does the protected mode setup (GDT, IDT, etc) and jumps into the protected mode code (head.S)

BSD on the otherhand pretty much is entered already in protected mode, and obtains this information by spawning a V86 (Virtual 8086 mode) task that performs any BIOS calls.

I'm not sure if that has any bearing on being able to boot from LinuxBIOS, just wanted to point it out.