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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."
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?
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.
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"
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.
I don't understand your point.
It's an interesting development on a cool bit of software. If you don't want to risk it yet, then don't. However if others want to tinker and play with it, then they can.
It's obvious that this doesn't interest you, so just ignore it - why are you so angry? Because it isn't finished yet?
The whole point of OS development is to 'release' it before it is done.
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?
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.
The whole thing? No. Each individual node in it? Yep.
Imagine a Beow...never mind, you don't have to image it; that's where it came from.
LinuxBIOS was originally created at LANL in order to build a supercomputer on the cheap. If the researchers were going to use a cluster, then they needed a way to distribute the OS to the machines. Obviously, they could have put disks on the individual nodes, but that would have been both expensive, noisy, and failure prone. They could have used a network boot strategy, but that would have been both slow and failure prone. Instead, they created a method for booting directly to their version of the Linux kernel in BIOS. They have no GUI to bring up, so this is blindingly fast, and the resulting nodes have no moving parts, so they are cheap, quiet, and reliable.
I question the value of the project outside of this particular domain, but for their application, this is exactly the right solution.