LinuxBIOS ready to go mainstream
Thursday December 07, 2006 (09:01 AM GMT)
By: Bruce Byfield
After seven years of work, the LinuxBIOS project is on the brink of making a free BIOS a standard option for computers. Serious obstacles remain, including a lack of resources and resistance from some proprietary chipset manufacturers and OEMs, but the advantages of LinuxBIOS indicate that its availability to the average computer buyer may be only months away.
Full article at; http://enterprise.linux.com/enterprise/06/11/30/199208.shtml
taharka
Lexington, Kentucky U.S.A.
On THU, 7 DEC 2006, taharka wrote:
LinuxBIOS ready to go mainstream
Thursday December 07, 2006 (09:01 AM GMT)
By: Bruce Byfield
After seven years of work, the LinuxBIOS project is on the brink of making a free BIOS a standard option for computers. Serious obstacles remain, including a lack of resources and resistance from some proprietary chipset manufacturers and OEMs, but the advantages of LinuxBIOS indicate that its availability to the average computer buyer may be only months away.
Full article at; http://enterprise.linux.com/enterprise/06/11/30/199208.shtml
taharka
Lexington, Kentucky U.S.A.
Awesome.
After seven years of work, the LinuxBIOS project is on the brink of making a free BIOS a standard option for computers.
Look at the list of supported hardware. There seems to be a lack of any current production consumer boards on that list. It looks like the only athlon64/Opteron/turion support is for the ancient AMD-8111 reference chipset that no consumer motherboard uses.
http://linuxbios.org/Supported_Motherboards
This is worse than the trouble we have with finding supported wifi hardware.
-wolfgang
Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote:
After seven years of work, the LinuxBIOS project is on the brink of making a free BIOS a standard option for computers.
Look at the list of supported hardware. There seems to be a lack of any current production consumer boards on that list. It looks like the only athlon64/Opteron/turion support is for the ancient AMD-8111 reference chipset that no consumer motherboard uses.
http://linuxbios.org/Supported_Motherboards
This is worse than the trouble we have with finding supported wifi hardware.
-wolfgang
LinuxBIOS is designed for the needs of supercomputing cluster machines, almost all of those motherboards are Dual/Quad Socket boards (in fact they a be dual/quad socket boards). The people funding the projects interest lies in dual and quad socket boards, because they need high memory, and the high speed communication boards (Myrinet, Infiniband, ... ) and ports to support those high-speed communication boards cost more than most mid to high end desktop systems.
Roger
On Fri, 8 Dec 2006, Roger Heflin wrote:
Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote:
After seven years of work, the LinuxBIOS project is on the brink of making a free BIOS a standard option for computers.
Look at the list of supported hardware. There seems to be a lack of any current production consumer boards on that list. It looks like the only athlon64/Opteron/turion support is for the ancient AMD-8111 reference chipset that no consumer motherboard uses.
http://linuxbios.org/Supported_Motherboards
This is worse than the trouble we have with finding supported wifi hardware.
-wolfgang
LinuxBIOS is designed for the needs of supercomputing cluster machines, almost all of those motherboards are Dual/Quad Socket boards (in fact they a be dual/quad socket boards). The people funding the projects interest lies in dual and quad socket boards, because they need high memory, and the high speed communication boards (Myrinet, Infiniband, ... ) and ports to support those high-speed communication boards cost more than most mid to high end desktop systems.
i'm glad someone pointed out how this isn't as useful as it sounds. LinuxBIOS may be able to boot an embedded linux kernel through the BIOS, but you need to replace the BIOS chip since its too small to hold a kernel.