Google Sponsors the LinuxBIOS project

Rockgod noted that "The LinuxBIOS project aims to take down the last barrier in Open Source systems by providing a free firmware (BIOS) implementation. LinuxBIOS celebrates its Sixth anniversary this year, and has an installed base of over 1 million LinuxBIOS systems. With the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, that number is expected to exceed 10 million users in 2007. LinuxBIOS supports 65 mainboards from 31 vendors in v1 and another 56 mainboards from 27 vendors in v2"

Comments

Re:why would a major manufacturer of motheboards

[runderwo]

LinuxBIOS is not compatible with legacy DOS-based PC operating systems and the GPL does not allow for proprietary extensions.

BIOS + DRM = lockin ..

[rs232]

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,3911 6902,00.htm
http://slashdot.org/hardware/03/09/04/1427237.shtm l?tid=137&tid=185

Re:why would a major manufacturer of motheboards

[Laur]

LinuxBIOS is not compatible with legacy DOS-based PC operating systems

According to the ADLO page there is no reason that LinuxBIOS couldn't boot up DOS-based OSes with a bit of tweaking, it just seems that no one has bothered yet.

Re:Any place to buy the MOBO with lb pre-installed

[Laur]

Try starting with the Products page at LinuxBIOS.

Re:Hitting two sacred cows at once...

[Ant P.]

10 computers? That's odd, I could've sworn they made a few more than that.

Re:Info on Linux BIOS in actual usage?

[Shewmaker]

You can edit a plain text file in user space and write it to CMOS with at utility like lxbios or cmos_util. The options I've seen are: boot sequence related, ECC memory related, power on after failure, debug level, cpu throttling, and NMI related. I didn't see anything about the enabling and disabling of devices or fan control, but I'm sure it depends on how much effort the developers have put into a particular chipset/motherboard.

LinuxBIOS supports several different types of payloads: Linux, Open Firmware, Etherboot, etc. If you are using a Linux kernel payload, then you probably don't want to be upgrading it often. In that case, you can set up the first kernel to kexec a second kernel (before kexec, there was a patch called the two kernel monte).

AMD64's 64-bit mode is definitely supported.

It's not trivial (yet) to boot a version of MS Windows with LinuxBIOS, but using Linux as a BIOS can give all sorts of benefits. One very interesting capability for people running beowulf clusters is that you can boot over any network device that Linux supports (e.g. Myrinet or Infiniband). That may not mean anything to a regular home user, but the point is that you have a whole lot more flexibility in what you can do. Even if you don't want to make it boot your home system over your wireless LAN, it does increase your freedom and it prevents people from nibbling away at the freedom you already have.

I would say freedom from future DRM really is the biggest incentive for trying out LinuxBIOS at home. You can avoid Intel's EFI standard (they're pushing for it to be on all desktops and servers), which will enable companies to inflict DRM on you. Linus has made some very good points about why EFI is not good. One way to look at EFI is that it is basically an OS, and not a very good one.

There are several white papers and tutorials that do a good job of explaining how LinuxBIOS works. Look at the LinuxBIOS documentation section.

OLPC isn't using LinuxBIOS anymore

[burns210]

As of a few weeks ago, the OLPC project isn't using LinuxBIOS anymore, they have moved to OpenFirmware from Sun, which was recently open sourced. Sorry to burst the bubble.