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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."
One word: agnostic. It becomes agnostic in C as opposed to ASM.
Alright, at the risk of further revealing my stupidity--what does this matter? I mean, isn't the BIOS tied to the architecture of the chipset anyway? It's not like I'm going to write a C program that compiles into the BIOS for an x86 chipset and--oh, by the way--thank god I can also compile that down to a PowerPC binary! I don't think that any piece of that integrated circuit is going to be developed in a mirror fashion on a PPC architecture ... or is that common practice?
Doesn't each BIOS target one particular machine assembly language anyway?
My work here is dung.
Booting Linux (and other free operating systems) is relatively simple: They quite robust against quirks in the BIOS, as they're usually not part of the testsuite of the BIOS vendors.
It's also possible to boot Linux (and a smaller set of other free operating systems) without any PCBIOS interface (int 0x13 etc), as they don't rely on that.
Windows does. There has been, for a couple of years, a useful, but very fragile hack called ADLO, which was basically bochsbios ported onto coreboot, to provide the PCBIOS.
Recently, SeaBIOS (a port of bochsbios to C) appeared and was a more stable, more portable choice (across chipsets) in that regard.
So yes, we're proud that we can run the very latest Microsoft system, simply because it's less a given than booting Linux. ;-)
Even VirtualBox (commercially backed, and all) seems to require an update (very likely to its BIOS!) to support Windows 7. "We were first"