CoreBoot (LinuxBIOS) Can Boot Windows 7 Beta

billybob2 writes "CoreBoot (formerly LinuxBIOS), the free and open source BIOS replacement, can now boot Windows 7 Beta. Videos and screenshots of this demonstration, which was performed on an ASUS M2V-MX SE motherboard equipped with a 2GHz AMD Sempron CPU, can be viewed on the CoreBoot website. AMD engineers have also been submitting code to allow CoreBoot to run on the company's latest chipsets, such as the RS690 and 780G."

Comments

Re:What Benefit Does C Have Over Assembly?

[richlv]

as coreboot targets many bioses and platforms, i'd expect portability to become so much more important.
btw, i found an interview with coreboot developer at http://www.heise-online.co.uk/open/The-Open-Source-BIOS-is-Ten-An-interview-with-the-coreboot-developers--/features/112353/2. from there :

"The real accomplishment was to be able to write memory and other early initialization code in C. Which is much easier to write and maintain then assembler. Assembly code is fragile when you change it, especially when you don't have a stack. C is much more robust â" the code is easier to change without breaking everything. This makes coreboot easier to work on, to contribute to and to maintain."

Most of the BIOS is probably generic

[Giant Electronic Bra]

There may be SOME architecture specific code, even a lot of that can probably be written in C. 99% of the Linux kernel is C and that has to interact with hardware too.

As far as efficiency goes, in the old days it was true that a coder with an intimate knowledge of the architecture could usually hand code more efficient assembly. Modern C compilers however can do a LOT of optimization and generally the resulting code is faster than anything that could be coded by hand, or at least AS fast. Even if it is microscopically slower it is still a LOT easier to use C. Plus if hardware abstraction is done properly even a low level driver back end should be portable for the most part.

Manufacturer BIOS may be written in Assembly since they are A) targeting a specific board which is going to obviously only run that one family of chip and B) probably have a lot of legacy assembly code they would rather not bother to port to C. Neither of those would apply to Coreboot.

Re:Help! I'm conflicted!

[KasperMeerts]

What's more important to you? OSS graphics drivers or OSS BIOS? And by the way, if you need a decent graphics card, you're gonna need ATI or nVidia anyways, Intel doesn't make really high performance cards.