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LinuxBIOS Boots Linux, OpenBSD, Windows
Ivan writes "LinuxBIOS coupled with BOCHS has replaced the PC BIOS. The union of these two cool open source projects completely replaces closed source BIOS, while retaining the ability to boot other operating systems like BSD and Windows.
Here's the announcement."
Why not start using OpenFirmware on PCs???
Don't get too excited, winxp, win98 and freebsd don't boot yet. Freebsd needs PIRQ support while XP and 98 are held back by the lack of adequate ATA support. In the future they expect to have it worked out.
will this ever get adopted by big vendors like Dell, HPQ, Gateway, etc.
If not then no one will use it outside of the OSS community.
Yahoo! We've finally solved this huge "BIOS" problem that has been lingering around since, um, 1980, and now made it Free as in Freedom!
This is also especially innovative as there was no such thing as a BIOS coming standard on any motherboard till today.
I think I'll wait for a more mature release before I go replacing my Award BIOS. As much as I love open source stuff, I don't want to deal with my BIOS being screwed up at the moment.
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"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
This will prove to be an important step. Replacing closed source system is going to happen piece by piece. And more important, the BIOS comes under close scrutiny of brilliant pool of open source community.
Hmmm... Ok.. Chivas on the rocks.
... it's not as if you can buy motherboards that have no BIOS! :)
Or is it just for apps like bochs that need an implementation of a BIOS on software?
"Work has been funded by DARPA". These guys have been working for DARPA?
The same institution that is turning out to be the Source of Distilled Evil thanks to the Homeland Security Bill.
These guys should not have dealt with the devil.
If you install this, do you lose your old BIOS? For example, if I install it to my ASUS board, will it eliminate my ability to go to the BIOS setup menus? What happens to my ability to change the jumper settings through software?
OLPC Australia
OK, this is cool and all, but the quote:
Ironically, twenty years ago this month Compaq introduced their Compaq portable computer with the first BIOS outside of IBM
uses the idea of irony incorrectly, as many many people seem to do. It does not mean "coincidentally", as it is being used here. A sword swallower choking on a toothpick is irony. Completing a project 20 years after something similar was done is not.
Okay, from a user's perspective. Even if they consider your board "supported", *and* there aren't any bugs, I have one big question.
How "supported" is "supported"? Can I change all the parameters that I can now? Does the OS get back the right sizes of drives when it asks about them? Are there issues with setting stuff like the RTC? What is broken? How about temperature sensors and other stuff on the I2C bus?
Because I'm willing to be that "we can boot BSD" is a long way from "this is a complete, end-user ready product that supports all the functionality of the hardware."
May we never see th
Ever heard of the microkernel design? Whereas Linux is a monolithic vintage Unix design, HURD has much more potential in the long run. Better stability, modular easy-to-modify structure and so on.
Furthermore, HURD is a truly pure Free Software operating system. Linux has become tainted by the use of non-free tools like BitKeeper and closed source binary 3rd party drivers. That is not Free Software.
Granted, HURD has severe limitations regarding the hard drive partitions, but those should be overcome shortly.
Replacing the BIOS with an open source alternative is more a ideological victory than a practical one. But considering how large impact the first reverse engineered PC BIOS has had in the advance of personal computers, this is a important step for the whole OS movement.
"There is a terrorist behind every bush"
Will this be able to support special features on each motherboard that are present in a manufacturers own bios such as temperature sensors, clock speeds, case security features, etc.?
Will we be able to 'plug-in' support for booting from external devices like usb/firewire drives, flash cards, pcmcia devices, usb memory keys, and transparently make them look like a normal floppy/hdd.
Will this now make booting from a CD an older machine that doesn't presently possible?
Will I be able to replace the linuxbio with the original again if everything buggers up?
What about so called dual bios systems?
Does anyone know if this helps us in the war against Palladium and DRM?
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our American dead!
will this conflict with microsoft's palladium plans? sounds like yes. will microsoft try to boycott this project? (rhethorical question..)
(-2) Idiot who didn't read the article.
Look at the mailing list that this is on: Linuxbios. The /. story acts like this is some sort of big announcement or press release, but it's really just the mailing list version of a standard WIP page. They're not being pretentious about it or patting themselves on the back, but the person that submitted this story certainly is.
is here.
As an 'end user' I would rather deal with multi-booting a computer without using LILO or GRUB.
However, I have a few concerns, not on the technical side, but on the political/corporate side (and no, this is not a troll...sheesh)
- Will Microsoft, in its zeal to maintain some semblance of control, seek to disable Windows from using motherboards with this bios...perhaps as one of their many 'updates'?
- If Microsoft pushes forward their "trusted computing" through Palladium, how does this affect this project?
- Since this appears to be a government-funded project, will Microsoft scream that this is unfair (not that they have a point, but will they?). Since the US government seems to be unable to discipline the company, I'm wondering how much power they REALLY have over the government.
- Will this project eventually woo motherboard manufacturers were to leave the various BIOS companies (Award, etc.)?
Sheesh, that was a lot of questions about M$, but I'm not obsessed (sharpening ax on grindstone)
ANNOUNCE: LinuxBIOS booting Windows 2000 (free software BIOS)
which is a milestone in the LinuxBIOS project.
It claims nothing else.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
This is great and all, but don't expect to be able to use it if MS's palladium system is successful. In a palladium pc, the bios serves as part of the Core Trusted Root for Measurement, meaning that installing an open-source, unsigned alternative is not an option. This is not a soft option, like installing an unsigned OS -- a palladium system will let you install any software you want, including an operating system, but it won't allow unsigned code to use its "secure" features (including access to its stored machine-specific private key used for encrypting machine-specific content, or the sign-only key pair used exclusively for validating the machine's trusted status).
;) ) such as your home, would allow the user to totally subvert any security measure in place. Of course, palladium will be laughably easy to get past with direct unrestricted access to the physical device (as with EVERY Digital Restriction Mechanism), but it won't be legal to do so. Unless you perform an illegal (and risky if you're not an electronics guru) hardware mod, you won't be able to run (or rather, install) LinuxBIOS.
On the other hand, unsigned bioses are strictly not allowed. The bios is one of many hardware weak spots in palladium that, if compromised in an "adversarial environment" (yes, that's what they call it.
The only way you'll see LinuxBIOS on a palladium machine would be if
<disclaimer>
Yeah, I clicked the link and read the page, but I didn't go further and investigate the features offered by LinuxBIOS.
</disclaimer>
a motherboard company took the LinuxBIOS source, modified it to lock out the user and perform DRM functions, and submitted it to MS for signing. Then LinuxBIOS could be installed in a palladium machine. Of course, the mobo company would still have to release the source code to their mod under the GPL, but that's not going to do the end user any good -- it won't get them a signed AND free bios. Remember all those stories about DRM killing OSS? Well, they were exaggerated for the most part, but this is what they were talking about.
The point is, if we don't get the word out about palladium, it will be illegal to use this bios in its free state. That's the least of our worries.
So you can replace the perfectly good bios that comes with your pc with one that might work almost as well if you are very lucky and happen to have exactly the right hardware and software. The question "Why?" springs to mind here?
Sig is taking a break!
Sorry if this sounds like sci-fi, but I have started lately thinking whether it would be possible to launch a tiny REAL OS from within/integrated with the BIOS. A bit like vmware but on a even lower level - I am thinking this might start being possible now that BIOS capabilities are increasing all the time as well. This would provide many interesting possibilities. Do you see this impossible for some reason? The vmware page says : "VMware technology is patented and patent-pending" - does anyone know exactly which patents they have and what limitations do those pose.
Will there be any OpenSourced hardware for these things to run on?
/bin/ls | less ) you can't see what hardware bugs exist except by inferring their existance from their effects. Why don't people start designing open-source CPUs, chipsets etc?
;-). It would mean an end to Pentium F00F-style bugs, at least...
Think about it: all I hear the OpenSource monkeys chatering about is OpenSource software (from Linux kernels and KDE to bare-metal stuff like this). All the hardware these things run on is just as proprietary as Windows XP.
Now, while you can unscrew the case and have a peer inside (much as true programming gurus can see what a program does by doing cat
Of course, as there aren't all that many chip fabrication plants around we will have to rely on Intel and friends (enemies ?) taking the GPL/BSD/MIT/insert favourite licence here chip designs, making them and flogging them for loads (captive market, y'see. "Here is the chip design, you want this in Socket 468 format give us three hundred dollars". I think that the GPL allows that). I'm not all that sure how these licences would apply to chip designs but still. There must be some chip design geniuses out there who aren't employed by AMD and by making a few chip designs GPLd they could change the way the computing world operates. And get a high-paying job out of it as well
Just a few thoughts, I doubt it will ever happen but still...
-Mark
i apologize. sorry.
Jan Alonzo
Please disconnect yourself immediatly. Your ideoligical goals are at odds with those of DARPA. As a result, it is a hyprocisy for you to continue to use a service which was developed using [D]ARPA funds.
Please feel free to email us once you have reconciled your ideology and lifestyle.
Yours,
DARPA
So I can finally give my old PC BIOS the boot!
This is fairly interesting. The board that they managed to boot is based upon the SiS 630e chip, which supports Pentium III/Celeron CPUs up to 1 GHz. I imagine you can scrounge one of these up with a Celeron for about $100. I wouldn't want to test this out on anything that isn't disposable and isn't anything other than a test platform. Still, having a spare BIOS chip laying around wouldn't hurt either. I wouldn't recommend trying this on any old board with any old chipset, unless you are willing to lose functionality of it either temporarily or permanently. A failed BIOS flash means that your system will have no way of bootstrapping itself unless you have a spare BIOS chip laying around (peovided that no hardware was damaged). This BIOS chip should have the BIOS version suitable for the board its made for. If you don't have access to a BIOS chip programmer, and you are somewhat of a cowboy, and you didn't reboot the PC with the failed BIOS flash, AND if you have a BIOS chip that is compatible with the one in the machine, gently pull the fragged BIOS out, put the new on in and flash it back to the factory AMI BIOS. BIOS r Fun. I hate them.
And why exactly is that so?
China would love this. Another step closer to paying no techno tax to the west.
Freedom of speech doesn't come with bandwidth.
Your delusions of control will be shattered the day Award/AMI and other manufacturers refuse to release specs. That will occur when your "freedom projects" start hitting their profits: they'll drop all support and you'll either bend over or accept their terms.
They manufacture the hardware, they control the platform.
> Jennifer Lopez = "JLo" (pron: "Jay-Low"). Bill Gates = "BGa" (pron: "Be-Gay")
I'd pronounce "BGa" as "bigger" (or be-gah)
-$|{
Has anyone actually read the links? This isn't the linuxBios project, it's a seperate project that adds 'trusted boot' to it.
From the umd site:
"Upon the completion of our research, open and closed source operating systems will have a high assurance bootstrap process available on a wide array of personal computer systems. In addition, the bootstrap process will include the capability for using cryptographic hardware-- in some cases tamper resistant. Providing a ``true'' trusted path from the power switch to the Operating System."
Sound familliar?
After the upgrade:
;)
Hmmm.... computer doesn't boot anymore, lets send in a bug report... errrmm.....
Beware of Programmers who carry screwdrivers. -- Leonard Brandwein
& include a self-adressed/stamped envelope with your correspondence.
Now we only need to put GRUB on the flashROM
and it will be allmost as nice as my AlphaStation!
An AC Grammar Nazi!!! RUN!!!!
If a motherboard company took the LinuxBIOS source, modified it to lock out the user and perform DRM functions, and submitted it to MS for signing. Then LinuxBIOS could be installed in a palladium machine. Of course, the mobo company would still have to release the source code to their mod under the GPL, but that's not going to do the end user any good -- it won't get them a signed AND free bios.
The GPL requires that you distribute *all* of the sources used to generate an executable. In this case, the executable includes a digital signature (it isn't runnable without the digital signature), and the source used to generate that digital signature is Microsoft's private key. (note: IANAL)
Doug Moen.
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
Imagine if this could be made to work on an MS Xbox? It would transform that clunky Halo-player into a practical work computer - or even an affordable clustering machine.
are we going to start protesting the "mobo tax" now and demand pcs be shipped without a bios so we can use this one?
Yet another victory for Linux! World domination is well on it's way!
I thought that others had already had success with clustering hacked XBox's. What was their trick?
how does one load the software if the BIOS fails to allow you to boot? I know that in the past this has been the problem with BIOS from whoever (Award, Pheonix, etc). It would be nice to not get screwed like that (and I also refer to the "should be" simple act of flash upgrading your BIOS with the vendors approved version. Sometimes things just can go wrong.
So this got me thinking...
When the FSF says that their computers only run free software, they are "forgetting" the fact that they've needed the proprietary BIOS (until now, maybe)?
Flawed logic from the FSF?
Yeah! Excellent point! So, FSF's frontman RMS should actually call all GNU programs as BIOS/GNU/ application x. ;)
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How is parent a troll?
He/she makes a valid point, and makes a discussion whether running Free oftware on proprietary *firmware* constitutes a totally Free (as in speech) system.
Moderators failing to be objective? I think so.
What I don't understand is why people aren't pushing for faster power-on times in practice for all PC's. Why can't something like DiskOnChip be used for all of the boot processes? Wouldn't boot be faster if all of /boot and some of /etc was on a faster read/write device like DiskOnChip on the motherboard?
With RAM and Hard Disk prices dropping so fast, it's good for mass storage. But it seems that I see very few projects (other than the odd embedded project or two) that actually look at bringing a regular OS closer to the speed and responce times of a real-time OS.
The only thing I would see BIOS helping in would be if it provided a WHAM-BAM up and running OS from power on. And there have to be a dozen possable solutions. I agree in principle it's worth hacking the BIOS, but I wonder if it's truely the best/fastest way to help system preformance for the typical workstation.
This is a really cool start, but would it be possible to intergrate real console port support?!
The x86 platform *really* could use something like that, especally if it's tied to Linux or one of the other many unix and unix like flavors on x86.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
I am not asking this with sarcasm, I just didn't see much about this on their web site.
Thanks.
Simpy
How long will it take for projects such as these to be hit by the l33t d00dz inserting a trojan, and then having a right royal time?
see subject
"This work has been funded by a grant from DARPA under the CHATS program." I was wondering why the US military would support this. darpa. Anyone knows?
Call me crazy, but it doesn't seem like they've done anything too exciting. I mean, Bochs already emulates a full x86 PC, it doesn't seem like it would take a genius to use that code to replace part of a real PC.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Does this mean- with the aid of the bios switcher - that by using a shitty mobo with support for 256kb (or larger) bios chips, I have a very heavy duty eprommer?
I was just going to lurk and mod- but this was far too interesting to miss. I build robots and other inventions, and good eprommers and good epromming software costs a fair bit. But this could be a great hack. Use my favourite editor and mod a compiler for which ever CPU/PLC I am using, and flash a compatible chip like it was a BIOS. Is this possible? are their standard eproms that could be used in these slots readily....
My god I think I need a cold shower - I never even thought of that.
OrionRobots.co.uk - Robots From sol
Bios development has stagnated. Actually, it stagnated immediately after the Phoenix, Award etc bioses came out in 1982. Since then, bioses have stayed essentially as awkward, feature-limited and buggy as ever. Minor improvements: guess the hard drive geometry, whoopie. Choices of and control over boot devices are still pathetically limited, and the way bios extensions are integrated (e.g., Intel boot agent, yuck) is user-offensive.
1) I want to boot off my compact flash reader for crying out loud, how hard is that? Will you show me an Award or Phoenix bios that can do it?
2) I want just one pause at boot where I can select either which OS configuration to boot, or alternatively, bios configuration. Not endless droning sequences of "now you can hit F2 to configure bios", "now you can hit Ctrl-S to configure PXE", "now you can hit Ctrl-R to configure raid". As a user interface that's just miserable. You have to sit their staring at the monitor waiting for just the right 2 seconds to hit exactly the right key, and if you miss, it's back to the beginning for you. With some boots taking two minutes that turns into a major timewaster. How hard is it to provide a framework so the OS boot selection and bios configuration are on the same menu? Answer: not hard, unless your name is Award or Phoenix.
The Bios used to be a convenient place for OEMs to hide crucial configuration details, keeping it all in the familly so to speak, but since that stuff has been largely decoded by OSS hordes and is ignored by Windows in favor built-in drivers, it's become increasing pointless. The bios has gone back to being what it always should have been: a way to boot. But the bioses served up to us by the incumbent manufacturers aren't even good at that.
Hence the need for OSS to invade that bastion of proprietary, closed code which once seemed to mysterious. It's not any more, simply because of the relentless pressure for components to standardize. It's now possible to write a bios that relies on such standard features as pci topology discovery to do its work.
At the very least, the general availablity of community-developed, peer-reviewed bioses will force the leading bios vendors to get off their tails and fix up their code to be less pathetically unusable than it is at present. At best, we're shortly arriving at the time where reflashing your bios is the very next thing you do after loading in the Linux installation CD.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Anyone care to wager whether this project or the GNU/HURD kernel will be the first one ready for prime time?
You see, a BIOS is not like an operating system, where 99.99% of users and vendors use the same exact version. (They change the application software that runs above it, but not the OS itself.) But vendors just about ALWAYS have to modify a BIOS to fit their specific hardware. And there's really no other practical way to do this other than to insert code directly into the BIOS itself. Code that must be modified in this way to be useful should really be licensed under an MIT/Apache-style license, so that anyone can do this without any constraints or special obligations.
An Apache/MIT license would also allow vendors to differentiate their products from their competitors' -- and might help them to survive in the face of stiff competition from the behemoths of the computing world. One reason why VA Linux's hardware business failed (and was shut down last year) is that VA was unable to distinguish their generic "white boxes" from other folks' products. One of the ways they might have been able to do it would have been to provide an especially good BIOS, BIOS support for unique peripherals or motherboard features, and/or special BIOS enhancements.
Under the GPL, one can't do this because any competitor can copy what you do. But under an MIT or Apache-style license, it would be possible for manufacturers to make mods to the BIOS without being forced to "donate" their hard work to rapacious competitors (including the big guys, such as Dell and HP).
Thus, it seems to me that an open source BIOS should be licensed under a license that allows maximum freedom, such as the Apache, MIT, or Artistic License.
It'll be a wonderful day when we'll finally be able to rid ourselves from those damned Award/AMI/Phoenix bug-riddled extremely legacy code.
Actually, we better get lawyers. If somebody manages to set up a LinuxBIOS based machine that also has an X server and a certain Gecko based web browser and then starts selling it in a thin-client configuration, the maker of Phoenix BIOS might get more than a little peeved.
Hooked on Phoenix worked for me!
Will I retire or break 10K?
unless the vendor's bios flasher messes up on you, in which case you needed to return that PC anyway
I previously gave two ways that a maker of a motherboard or adapter card can prevent this from ever happening.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Go ahead and flash in LinuxBios and try it out. Either it works or it doesn't. If it doesn't work, just reload the Vendor's bios
;-)
One thing I can't figure out is how, if your flashed LinuxBIOS is broken, how you can even necessarily boot back to FreeDOS to flash your BIOS again back to the vendor's BIOS. I'm not one of those fortunates with a BIOS-in-ROM that I can revert to by just closing a jumper...
No longer will you have to worry about your bios ever going obsolete
I can just see Debian putting this in their tree and apt-get flashing the BIOS.
May we never see th
In this case, the executable includes a digital signature (it isn't runnable without the digital signature), and the source used to generate that digital signature is Microsoft's private key. (note: IANAL)
Neither am I, but it seems that the GNU GPL, section 3, specifically excludes any software that came with the OS or the compiler toolchain from the requirement of distribution of source code. Because the linker signs the app, those who distribute signed binaries of GPL'd software do not need to distribute the system vendor's private key.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I was under the impression that if you were to do this, it would simply be that the Palladium services would be unavailable. It certainly wouldn't be illegal [...] If you were to do this (install a bios that does what you tell it to rather than what MS wants it to) you would have broken palladium. Once you can get the bios to tell the Core Root of Trust whatever you want, you can convince it you're running a secure OS on secure hardware. You could get access to keys and hardware crypto services from an unmodified linux kernel. That's circumvention, which is currently illegal.
I suppose if you just replaced the bios and never used its capabilities you'd be ok, but the TCPA specs only say that the manufacturer "must control updates to the bios". I can only assume that this means previous bioses would only allow themselves to be replaced by signed code, and if you somehow got past that requirement, that would be circumvention.
ok, it's great that there is an open source bios. But i don't really see the point. I mean, my bios works fine. I don't pay anything for it. and I don't see a reason for anyone to get a new bios(except an upgrade). it seems that a bios made by the board maker would work better then any other one too. I guess i'm saying it's a nice accomplishment, but no practical use i can see
Real time Linux does exactly this.
The real time kernel runs, and then runs the normal linux kernel under it.
To get access to the real time bits, you write kernel modules.
To communicate with your real time module, you use real time pipes (FIFOs)
I used this in my final year University Project, and it worked pretty well. We were doing AD/DA and fuzzy logic processing. All the fuzzy stuff was done in user land and the real time module did the AD/DA stuff as well as some other basic functions. (Like setting the output to all 0 if the input stream from the fuzzy logic failed)
Pretty neat stuff. Pity it seems that the above link wants money.
--- I hate my sig
Well, if there are any good-looking guys working there, then yes please!
What makes the "Homeland Security Bill" particularly offensive, *particularly* to those who are not either American citizens and/or American residents, is that it, in essence, claims jurisdiction over everyone in the world, without warrant or any sort of due process. "Suspicion" is now worse than actually and overtly commiting a crime.
Merely being a foriegn citizen inside the borders of your own country and obeying it's laws is no excuse.
It's a Brave New World.
KFG
listening to that stupid song, haven't you?
KFG
A lexical Nazi. Grammar is the art of *combining* words to form meaningful sentences and has nothing to do with the definitions and meanings of individual words.
Get it right you illiterate clod.
KFG
A lexical Nazi. Grammar is the art of *combining* multiple words into meaningful sentences. It has nothing at all to do with the meaning of indivdual words.
Get it right you illiterate clod.
(Note for the humor impaired, or those with an intellect of the lower sort that can rust irony at 100 paces, this post *is* ironic)
Yep, I've got an old Shuttle P-II/233 mobo that can support both 1Mb and 2Mb flash chips and I use it all the time to prepare different flash bios chips for other motherboards. Just a few days ago I used it to reload the flash chip from a friend's Soyo 6BA+ IV mobo after he has a power brownout while flashing his bios. I just boot the mobo with it's regular flash bios and a boot floppy, then after it's up and running, I CAREFULLY remove the flash chip from its socket and CAREFULLY insert the other flash chip. Make sure you DO NOT insert the chip backwards or it will positively get fried (I know for a fact :-( )and maybe fry the mobo as well. I've been lucky and only fried a chip once by being a homer simpson. Also try to insert the flash chip with all pins as simultaneously as you can. Pretend you are a brain surgeon. Once the new chip is in, you can then run your favorite flash utility and load whatever flash image into the chip you please. I prefer to use "UNIFLASH" a free flash utility that'll work with ami, award, phoenix, whatever flash images. It'll probably workjust fine with LinuxBIOS too.
Why do I go thru all this hassle? I'm too cheap bastard to buy a proper EPROM/EEPROM burner since a decent one costs $200. This kludge works for free since I got the old mobo for nothing out of the trash can.
Richard Stallman himself says so. "The GPL is not Mr. Nice Guy," says Stallman, pointing out the ways in which the GPL is specifically intended to be onerous to software vendors and other software-based businesses. Denying freedom to some, but not others, is exactly the intent of the GPL.
Or maybe I just need some sleep. :-) But, anyway...
When do we really see the _same_ kernel? Probably on all Dell Dimension L337. And you betcha that those Dimension L337 will have the same BIOS as well. Now, let's say that Dell also has Dimension K3WL, with a different BIOS of course, since BIOS are specific to the hardware. Well, guess what, you can also betcha that the K3WL will have a different kernel than the L337. If you are going to argue that they are the same kernel, then I will argue that they are the same BIOS, from Pheonix BIOS. What? Just because a kernel has the same set of (unused) modules means that they are the same? It is just the opposite! The modules exist because it is obvious that each computer is different! If they are the same, why not just a monolitic chunk, why the modules?
So I submit to you the idea that the kernel varies much more than the BIOS. So I will challenge your claim that 99.99% of all (linux) kernels are the same.
Cheers,
e.
If the LinuxBIOS folks think they can reverse engineer all the various mobo chipsets and supporting chips and all the various ways you can hook up these chips and somehow magically recreate the SMI handler that is specific to each machine type and code around all the chip bugs, good luck. I for one would rather spend my time doing something productive.
This actually has huge practical benefits. LinuxBIOS like derivatives are used in tons of embedded projects. I can go from powerup to multitasking Linux kernel in about 3 seconds on a slow machine without doing a lot of optimization (ie decoding the kernel out of flash) I bet I could drop that the about 1.5 seconds if needed. init is running within about 5 seconds as is.
where i can plug in my cyclades ts box, and watch the boot process from beginning to end while i develop my jumpstart/kickstart scripts.... without needing this http://www.realweasel.com?
please give me ssh running on the bios.
please please please.
This is true for TCPA, but I don't think it's true for Palladium.
Microsoft has been incredibly secretive about how Palladium will work, but they've been very vocal about its features that could help consumers such as eliminating viruses and spam. However, considering what's been uncovered by journalists that were able to whisper clues through non-disclosure agreement gags, we know that palladium will also place restrictions on how much access users can get to their pcs, mostly through digital signatures on operating system components.
The TCPA is a entire scheme for Digital Restriction Mechanisms (and other things) that encompases hardware, software, apps, and even non-pc devices such as pdas and digital televisions. Palladium fits the OS specifications of the pc-specific TCPA standard like a glove.
Yep, I've got an old Shuttle P-II/233 mobo that can support both 1Mb and 2Mb flash chips and I use it all the time to prepare different flash bios chips for other motherboards.
:-( )and maybe fry the mobo as well. I've been lucky and only fried a chip once by being a homer simpson.
I'm considering replacing the flashrom socket on the next decent mobo I find on the street with a ZIF just for the function of restoring BIOS'.
Make sure you DO NOT insert the chip backwards or it will positively get fried (I know for a fact
I've done the Homer flash procedure too and I've been in electronics since the 80's. The stuff I do at home is pretty carefree (especially at 4am). ; ) Did the sticker on that flashrom that you fried instantly blister up with the heat?! Cool! (Luckily amongst my "junk" I kept an old flashrom from a buggered board that finally came in handy.
The coolest thing I have ever seen (along these lines) is a Tantalum that was soldered in around the wrong way, which spouted a fountain of smoke and what looked like mercury bubbles.
I prefer to use "UNIFLASH" a free flash utility that'll work with ami, award, phoenix, whatever flash images.
Hey cool, thanks for that.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?