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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."
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.
Oh you mean like this:
http://www.freiburg.linux.de/OpenBIOS/
They will be able to leverage some of the work (init code) of LinuxBIOS.
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. I even kept a couple of openfirmware images for the Voodoo3's and other hardware lying in this room, just in case openfirmware will get used in another machine than my mac.
This rules.
Before upgrading your BIOS, you should always make a backup of the old one. You can find the BIOS upgrade utility from Asus' homepage. That utility can be used to read/write the BIOS. So if you upgrade and don't like the new one, you can downgrade to the one you had before if you saved it on a floppy. However, playing with the BIOS is a risky business. Be careful.
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.
This is very useful for the Open Hardware community. It's one important step closer to having every piece of a working PC's hardware and software opened. With the hardware open sourced as well as the software users have some choice in what they use.. important considering the push for DRM and similar hardware crap being forced on us.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Several patents apply to the BIOS like the algorithm to identify 720 KB vs 1440 KB floppies.
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
Why don't people start designing open-source CPUs, chipsets etc?
Yeah, why not?
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.
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?
This has already been done a couple of times.
There is a software product called Steeplechase that is used for PC based control. It loads a Real Time OS first. This handles all of the control application. Windows NT/2000 is then run as a low priority process of the RTOS. It allows the control application to respond to real time constraints and products the control application from a Windows crash.
I believe that one of the Linux RTOS solutions uses a very similar approach.
I also believe that this is how the VMware GSX server product works.
No that's _not_ irony!!!! That's a common misperception of what irony means ala Alanis Morisette.
(from Cambridge International Dictionary of English)
irony (WRONG RESULT)
noun [U]
a situation in which something which was intended to have a particular result has the opposite or a very different result
The irony (of it) is that the new tax system will burden those it was intended to help.
The boy who fell in the river survived but the man who jumped in to save him drowned - a tragic irony.
A sword swaller choking on a toothpick is NOT irony!!!
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.
You could use a BIOS switcher tool like the Bios Savior. It sells for ~$20-30. With it, you can keep your known-working BIOS backed up, fool around with LinuxBIOS or other BIOS changes, and then if you can't boot or get locked out...switch back.
Cost: From ~$20 to ~$30 USD -- depending on the seller.
Disclaimer: I haven't used this...just passing it along. All BIOS upgrades I've done were for minor BIOS revisions or (if beta) after a few others had upgraded. Because of that, a BIOS backup tool like BIOS Savior is really overkill. For LinuxBIOS or other drastic changes, it sounds like an ideal tool.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
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?
The answer to this is clear when you know that Linux almost completely ignores the bios after it boots. The emphatically includes hard drive configuration. To prove this to yourself, go into your bios and set all your hard drives, CDRoms etc. *except* your boot disk to "none". Boot Linux. Hey, it works just the same as it did before, amazing. The reason for this is, Linux is perfectly capable of ignoring the configuration information returned by the bios, because too often that information is just plain wrong. So Linux has been forced to discover that information for itself by directly querying buses, controllers etc, and basically, knowing about every hardware device in the world. Impressive achievement, when you think about it.
Linux now knows a lot of temperature sensors and the like, in spite of the reluctance of companies like Intel to release the technical specifications. I believe we're either at the point or close to it where Linux does a better job on the sensors than the bios does. Some other items are still sore points, such as processor speed configuration, which again has been kept as a deep dark secret by Intel and others. Another item in this category is power management, and then there is SMM - system management mode. All this is in various stages of reverse engineering. At some point, Intel will even get a clue and realize it's to their advantage to release these specs openly, instead of thinking they can exert some kind of control over the industry by keeping it secret. They can't, which has been proved time and again. All they can do is make things so that the code is not peer-reviewed, and therefore buggy and unreliable. (Don't tell me your power management isn't buggy, I won't believe you.) Another bad effect is that when your manufacturer goes under or EOLs the product you no longer get bios upgrades, too damm bad.
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."
So? As soon as you get a new computer, the first thing you should do is make sure you can reflash the bios with the vendor's latest bios upgrade. If you don't do that, I can assure you that you will regret it a few years down the road, when you are forced to upgrade the bios for some reason, larger hard disks being a perennial example of such a reason. So, once you've done that, put aside a floppy disk with the bios upgrade image and a copy of FreeDos on it, and you are safe (unless the vendor's bios flasher messes up on you, in which case you needed to return that PC anyway). 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 (which you already verified works correctly, right?) If it does work, you will have a clean, cool boot and endless source of upgrades. No longer will you have to worry about your bios ever going obsolete or bios bugs going unfixed forever. Never mind the fact it boots faster.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
IMHO the primary application of this is in virtual and emulated PCs. If you have ever used VMWare, you'll notice that they actually use the Phoenix BIOS. There are two Free Software projects that provide "machine in machine" capability: Bochs and plex86. Both of these require a BIOS to function. There is a closed source BIOS (I forget whose) who has allowed bochs and plex86 to distribute a binary version only for use in those programs. Having to distribute a closed binary with a Free Software product is problematic. Thus, the project to produce a Free Software BIOS.
Some low-end hardware OEMs might be interested in a Free BIOS as well, since this would allow them to sell their cheap hardware even cheaper.
But you asked about userland. In userland, the main use will be for emulators and virtual PCs.
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
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