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LinuxBIOS Project Usenix Paper

Posted by timothy on Wed Dec 10, 2003 10:52 AM
from the bochsen dept.
Operating Systems Software Hardware
caseih writes "The LinuxBIOS project has published a paper on using the open source bios code from bochs to help boot unmodified OSes such as Windows 2000, which was presented at the recent Usenix Conference. This was mentioned previously on Slashdot, but this paper gives more technical details on how they did it, some details about future possibilities, and their guiding philosophies behind this project."
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  • Now the market has to pressure harware makers... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by smitty_one_each (243267) on Wednesday December 10 2003, @05:46PM (#7684609) Homepage Journal
    ...to provide this BIOS on new systems.
    Or is there some Mysterious Subterfuge preventing this?

    • Re:Now the market has to pressure harware makers.. (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Doesn't sound like it boots DOS. If you want a "PC", it's gotta boot DOS.

      (And I'm not joking -- every new P4 that shows up at work boots first into DOS to pull down the Ghost image.)

  • OpenBIOS (Score:5, Informative)

    by turgid (580780) on Thursday December 11 2003, @05:08AM (#7688285) Journal
    OpenBIOS [openbios.org] is another interesting free BIOS project for PeeCees which aims to implement the Open Firmware (IEEE 1275-1994) standard, as used on Sun SPARC machines and Apple Power PC machines.

    It's interesting because Open Firmware is based around a FORTH [forth.org] interpreter, using which high-level BIOS code is implemented. This code is portable across different binary architectures. This has interesting implications for the initialisation of peripherals. It also means you can program your own BIOS at a command line at system start up.

    There are loads of other uses, and it's already an establishged Open standard, and has been in use for well over a decade.

    • From OpenBIOS homepage:
      It is our expressed wish to work with the LinuxBIOS team on the lowlevel bootstrapping. They have a growing range of systems working without any other firmware directly booting an ELF binary from Flash. The OpenBIOS kernel was tested with various systems running as a payload of LinuxBIOS

      LinuxBIOS goal is to do as little BIOS work as possible since legacy BIOS bugs and shortcomings forces the Linux kernel to redo all those initializations anyway. With Bochs running on Linux the no
    • Except that OpenBIOS is total vaporware. And from the looks of their site, is likely to remain so forever.

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