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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.
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.
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
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..)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Microkernels have their pros and cons, with their main con being slower speed due to the greater need for message passing. The open source nature of Linux allows it to have a monolithic design with many microkernel-like properties.
With that said, GNU/HURD still has a lot going for it. Whereas Linux is essentially a UNIX clone (and there's nothing wrong with that), GNU/HURD is very different. Remember, GNU means "GNU's Not UNIX". There is a great overview of HURD given at KernelTrap.
OLPC Australia
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
Well, but linuxbios is not just about booting, Im currently using LinuxBIOS in a project that uses it as full Operating System, with the Advantage that it boots directly from EPROM, No HD required ;)
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.
China would love this. Another step closer to paying no techno tax to the west.
Freedom of speech doesn't come with bandwidth.
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
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.
Yeah! Excellent point! So, FSF's frontman RMS should actually call all GNU programs as BIOS/GNU/ application x. ;)
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why does anyone care?
We don't have anything better to do on weekends.
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.
I am not asking this with sarcasm, I just didn't see much about this on their web site.
Thanks.
Simpy
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.
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
It looks like the fsmlabs product has come a long way. It is really great that they make it available for free. I think that this approach has several advantages over the Steeplechase system in that you can probably do a lot more with the RTOS. The Steeplechase RTOS was limited.
Unfortunately, Steeplechase didn't make any money. There were licensing costs with the Radisys kernel and most professional controls folks were afraid for PC based control. I have to admit that I would probably limit my exposure to things like data acquisition and small controls projects. Many of the things that I work on tend to go boom or release dangerous chemicals when they fail.
The last thing that I used Steeplechase for was NASA's Payload Ground Handling Mechanism that loads payloads into the space shuttle. We used Steeplchase as a watchdog over the motion controllers. It compared operator input to the motion of the gantry and hit the kill switch if the motion controller seemed to be out of control. It worked very well in that application.
As far as cost, Steeplechase was competitive. It cost about the same to buy the I/O and software as it did to purchase a PLC.