Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
Search

News for nerds, stuff that matters

LinuxBIOS Boots Linux, OpenBSD, Windows

Posted by timothy on Mon Nov 25, 2002 05:50 AM
from the with-source dept.
Linux
Ivan writes "LinuxBIOS coupled with BOCHS has replaced the PC BIOS. The union of these two cool open source projects completely replaces closed source BIOS, while retaining the ability to boot other operating systems like BSD and Windows. Here's the announcement."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
LinuxBIOS Boots Linux, OpenBSD, Windows | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 265 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold:
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • first post (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 25 2002, @05:52AM (#4750056)
    Why not start using OpenFirmware on PCs???

  • rushed announcement (Score:5, Informative)

    by Afrosheen (42464) on Monday November 25 2002, @05:53AM (#4750061)
    Don't get too excited, winxp, win98 and freebsd don't boot yet. Freebsd needs PIRQ support while XP and 98 are held back by the lack of adequate ATA support. In the future they expect to have it worked out.

    • How useful is this? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by 0x0d0a (568518) on Monday November 25 2002, @06:01AM (#4750087) Journal
      Okay, from a user's perspective. Even if they consider your board "supported", *and* there aren't any bugs, I have one big question.

      How "supported" is "supported"? Can I change all the parameters that I can now? Does the OS get back the right sizes of drives when it asks about them? Are there issues with setting stuff like the RTC? What is broken? How about temperature sensors and other stuff on the I2C bus?

      Because I'm willing to be that "we can boot BSD" is a long way from "this is a complete, end-user ready product that supports all the functionality of the hardware."
      [ Parent ]

      • ANNOUNCE: LinuxBIOS booting Windows 2000 (Score:4, Informative)

        by DrSkwid (118965) on Monday November 25 2002, @06:17AM (#4750146) Homepage Journal
        ANNOUNCE: LinuxBIOS booting Windows 2000 (free software BIOS)

        which is a milestone in the LinuxBIOS project.

        It claims nothing else.

        [ Parent ]
        • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
      • What problem does this solve? by otisg (Score:3) Monday November 25 2002, @10:38AM

      • Re:How useful is this? (Score:5, Informative)

        by SurfsUp (11523) on Monday November 25 2002, @12:18PM (#4752171)
        How "supported" is "supported"? Can I change all the parameters that I can now? Does the OS get back the right sizes of drives when it asks about them? Are there issues with setting stuff like the RTC? What is broken? How about temperature sensors and other stuff on the I2C bus?

        The answer to this is clear when you know that Linux almost completely ignores the bios after it boots. The emphatically includes hard drive configuration. To prove this to yourself, go into your bios and set all your hard drives, CDRoms etc. *except* your boot disk to "none". Boot Linux. Hey, it works just the same as it did before, amazing. The reason for this is, Linux is perfectly capable of ignoring the configuration information returned by the bios, because too often that information is just plain wrong. So Linux has been forced to discover that information for itself by directly querying buses, controllers etc, and basically, knowing about every hardware device in the world. Impressive achievement, when you think about it.

        Linux now knows a lot of temperature sensors and the like, in spite of the reluctance of companies like Intel to release the technical specifications. I believe we're either at the point or close to it where Linux does a better job on the sensors than the bios does. Some other items are still sore points, such as processor speed configuration, which again has been kept as a deep dark secret by Intel and others. Another item in this category is power management, and then there is SMM - system management mode. All this is in various stages of reverse engineering. At some point, Intel will even get a clue and realize it's to their advantage to release these specs openly, instead of thinking they can exert some kind of control over the industry by keeping it secret. They can't, which has been proved time and again. All they can do is make things so that the code is not peer-reviewed, and therefore buggy and unreliable. (Don't tell me your power management isn't buggy, I won't believe you.) Another bad effect is that when your manufacturer goes under or EOLs the product you no longer get bios upgrades, too damm bad.

        Because I'm willing to be that "we can boot BSD" is a long way from "this is a complete, end-user ready product that supports all the functionality of the hardware."

        So? As soon as you get a new computer, the first thing you should do is make sure you can reflash the bios with the vendor's latest bios upgrade. If you don't do that, I can assure you that you will regret it a few years down the road, when you are forced to upgrade the bios for some reason, larger hard disks being a perennial example of such a reason. So, once you've done that, put aside a floppy disk with the bios upgrade image and a copy of FreeDos [freedos.org] on it, and you are safe (unless the vendor's bios flasher messes up on you, in which case you needed to return that PC anyway). Go ahead and flash in LinuxBios and try it out. Either it works or it doesn't. If it doesn't work, just reload the Vendor's bios (which you already verified works correctly, right?) If it does work, you will have a clean, cool boot and endless source of upgrades. No longer will you have to worry about your bios ever going obsolete or bios bugs going unfixed forever. Never mind the fact it boots faster.
        [ Parent ]
        • Fw:How to avoid fsckups when flashing BIOS by yerricde (Score:1) Monday November 25 2002, @01:04PM
        • Thank you -- informative by 0x0d0a (Score:3) Monday November 25 2002, @01:16PM

          • Re:Thank you -- informative (Score:5, Informative)

            by SurfsUp (11523) on Monday November 25 2002, @01:40PM (#4752725)
            "Go ahead and flash in LinuxBios and try it out. Either it works or it doesn't. If it doesn't work, just reload the Vendor's bios"

            One thing I can't figure out is how, if your flashed LinuxBIOS is broken, how you can even necessarily boot back to FreeDOS to flash your BIOS again back to the vendor's BIOS. I'm not one of those fortunates with a BIOS-in-ROM that I can revert to by just closing a jumper...

            Yes, important question.

            1) Make sure your bios is socketed, not soldered onto the motherboard when you buy your computer. If it isn't socketed, you don't want that computer because the manufacturer doesn't care about you. 2) Get this thingy [pcmods.com]. 3) Get a new flash chip and verify you can make/boot a backup bios 4) You can relax now.

            There are other ways to get around bios re-flash disasters, for example, you can use a running PC as a crude kind of flash writer by hot plugging a bios flash chip, being careful not to short anything. But the dual-socket approach abover is really the easy and safe way to go. I'd say, whether or not you indend to reflash your bios, it's well worth grabbing one of those dual flash sockets just in case you ever need it.
            [ Parent ]
          • Re:Thank you -- informative by mamba-mamba (Score:3) Monday November 25 2002, @03:11PM
    • Re:rushed announcement by John Hasler (Score:2) Monday November 25 2002, @12:00PM
    • Re:rushed announcement by Codifex Maximus (Score:2) Monday November 25 2002, @02:40PM
    • HURD by Anonymous Coward (Score:1) Monday November 25 2002, @06:04AM
      • Re:HURD by The Original Yama (Score:3) Monday November 25 2002, @06:21AM
        • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
      • Re:HURD by Anonymous Coward (Score:1) Monday November 25 2002, @06:34AM
      • Re:HURD by 10Ghz (Score:1) Monday November 25 2002, @07:11AM
        • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
      • Re:HURD by kasperd (Score:1) Monday November 25 2002, @02:04PM
      • 2 replies beneath your current threshold.

    • Re:rushed announcement (Score:4, Interesting)

      by MWelchUK (585458) on Monday November 25 2002, @07:41AM (#4750419)
      BTW Linux doesn't use the bios once past the basic boot phase - my mouse works (MS Explorer), My NVidia GeForce II works fine (Mandrake 9.0) AND my computer crashes only if I do something really stupid. Most of the time Lockups can be sorted out by killing X or loging in remotely (via a secure connection - SSH) and killing the process causing the problem, but this is rarely needed.

      Hmmm, Beer.... ... But I digress.

      The Linux Bios is at a state now where boot time is limited by the time taken for the drives to spin up (Note: got to get flash HD for root...)

      ASUS may provide **FREE** bios upgrades, this is to fix errors and poss minor speed improvements. I doubt they will support the mentioned implementation of secure hardware with iButtons and alike - Does this look like an alternative (abet slightly different) to Palladium...
      [ Parent ]
      • Re:rushed announcement by LordNimon (Score:1) Monday November 25 2002, @08:10AM
        • Re:rushed announcement by BlackHawk-666 (Score:1) Monday November 25 2002, @08:43AM

          • Re:rushed announcement (Score:4, Offtopic)

            by LordNimon (85072) on Monday November 25 2002, @10:14AM (#4751283)
            Well, under Windows it might, but it doesn't have to. There is a floppy driver for OS/2, and formatting doesn't use any CPU under OS/2. In fact, formatting floppies while printing, recalculating a large spreadsheet, and playing an audio file without hiccup was one of the early demonstrations of OS/2 at trade shows.
            [ Parent ]
          • Re:rushed announcement by ncc74656 (Score:3) Monday November 25 2002, @11:52AM
        • Re:rushed announcement by SurfsUp (Score:2) Monday November 25 2002, @12:45PM

      • Re:rushed announcement (Score:5, Informative)

        by DCowern (182668) on Monday November 25 2002, @08:41AM (#4750679) Homepage

        BTW Linux doesn't use the bios once past the basic boot phase

        The 2.4.x series might not but if you take a look at the 2.5.x development series, you'd be in for a surprise. One of the major changes apparent when you do a 'make yourfavoriteconfig' is that they're working on MAJOR changes in the way linux uses the BIOS.

        The most apparent changes are getting PnP information from the BIOS ang getting ACPI and APM configurations from the BIOS. There are others that I can't remember off the top of my head right now -- I'm on a machine I'm not crazy enough to install 2.5 on ;-)

        While I don't really see the need for an open BIOS right now, we can't rule out the need for one in the future. Several people have already mentioned the DRM/Palladium dilemma. I think this is also an important step in paving the way to open hardware. While truly open hardware design is a way off, it's one of those nice things to dream about, whether or not it ever happens.

        [ Parent ]
      • Re:rushed announcement by imroy (Score:1) Monday November 25 2002, @03:16PM
    • Re:rushed announcement by JohnFluxx (Score:3) Monday November 25 2002, @08:43AM
    • Re:rushed announcement by fshalor (Score:2) Monday November 25 2002, @09:46AM
      • Re:rushed announcement by tomstdenis (Score:1) Monday November 25 2002, @12:16PM

        • Re:rushed announcement (Score:4, Insightful)

          by YU Nicks NE Way (129084) on Monday November 25 2002, @12:49PM (#4752432)
          The whole thing? No. Each individual node in it? Yep.

          Imagine a Beow...never mind, you don't have to image it; that's where it came from.

          LinuxBIOS was originally created at LANL in order to build a supercomputer on the cheap. If the researchers were going to use a cluster, then they needed a way to distribute the OS to the machines. Obviously, they could have put disks on the individual nodes, but that would have been both expensive, noisy, and failure prone. They could have used a network boot strategy, but that would have been both slow and failure prone. Instead, they created a method for booting directly to their version of the Linux kernel in BIOS. They have no GUI to bring up, so this is blindingly fast, and the resulting nodes have no moving parts, so they are cheap, quiet, and reliable.

          I question the value of the project outside of this particular domain, but for their application, this is exactly the right solution.
          [ Parent ]
    • Re:rushed announcement by joelwest (Score:2) Monday November 25 2002, @10:12AM
    • Re:rushed announcement by SwellJoe (Score:2) Monday November 25 2002, @11:25AM
    • Re:rushed announcement by SurfsUp (Score:3) Monday November 25 2002, @12:28PM
    • Re:rushed announcement by kasperd (Score:2) Monday November 25 2002, @02:22PM
    • 3 replies beneath your current threshold.

  • What I want to know is.. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 25 2002, @05:53AM (#4750062)
    will this ever get adopted by big vendors like Dell, HPQ, Gateway, etc.

    If not then no one will use it outside of the OSS community.

    • Re:What I want to know is.. (Score:5, Informative)

      by MikeFM (12491) on Monday November 25 2002, @06:15AM (#4750138) Homepage Journal
      This is very useful for the Open Hardware community. It's one important step closer to having every piece of a working PC's hardware and software opened. With the hardware open sourced as well as the software users have some choice in what they use.. important considering the push for DRM and similar hardware crap being forced on us.
      [ Parent ]
    • Dear Internet User by Anonymous Coward (Score:2) Monday November 25 2002, @06:36AM
    • Re:Funded by DARPA?!?!?! by smitty_one_each (Score:2) Monday November 25 2002, @09:26AM
    • Yes, you would by kfg (Score:1) Monday November 25 2002, @04:40PM
    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.

  • One GIANT leap for Free Software! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 25 2002, @05:55AM (#4750068)
    Yahoo! We've finally solved this huge "BIOS" problem that has been lingering around since, um, 1980, and now made it Free as in Freedom!

    This is also especially innovative as there was no such thing as a BIOS coming standard on any motherboard till today.

  • Cool but.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by miketang16 (585602) on Monday November 25 2002, @05:55AM (#4750069) Journal
    I think I'll wait for a more mature release before I go replacing my Award BIOS. As much as I love open source stuff, I don't want to deal with my BIOS being screwed up at the moment.
    • Re:Cool but.... by DeathPenguin (Score:2) Monday November 25 2002, @07:52AM

    • Re:Cool but.... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Shanep (68243) on Monday November 25 2002, @08:10AM (#4750526) Homepage
      I think I'll wait for a more mature release before I go replacing my Award BIOS. As much as I love open source stuff, I don't want to deal with my BIOS being screwed up at the moment.

      Incase anyone ever does find themselves in a pickle with a failed BIOS flashrom...

      You can often use flashrom chips from other motherboards, sometimes even if they are a different type of flashrom.

      I had one machine BIOS upgrade go really bad (no longer even got to display any POST info at all, not even frantic beeping), I pulled the bad flashrom out, booted another motherboard with a DOS floppy with the old ROM image and flash program, while it was ON I pulled out the good flashrom and inserted the bad (two completely different models of motherboard), flashed the bad rom back to the old image, swapped the flashroms back and presto, both machines working.

      You have to be very careful not to short anything when extracting the flashroms while the PC is ON and whatever you do, don't insert them the wrong way around!

      The Award flashers will typically detect the part type and voltage, warn you that it's not the correct image for the current motherboard (if the mobos are sufficiently different) and then proceed to flash if you give it the OK.

      This should probably only be done as a desperate measure where you can afford to loose the motherboard that you temporarily flash with. Pick up some PC's off the street for spare flashroms and elligible flasher motherboards that you don't mind wrecking.

      My OpenBSD file server is a Pentium 200MMX that someone just threw out. Works beautifully. In fact every PC I've picked up off the street has worked without any problems.

      [ Parent ]

    • Re:Cool but.... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Spoing (152917) on Monday November 25 2002, @09:17AM (#4750905) Homepage
      I think I'll wait for a more mature release before I go replacing my Award BIOS. As much as I love open source stuff, I don't want to deal with my BIOS being screwed up at the moment.

      You could use a BIOS switcher tool like the Bios Savior [bit-tech.net]. It sells for ~$20-30. With it, you can keep your known-working BIOS backed up, fool around with LinuxBIOS or other BIOS changes, and then if you can't boot or get locked out...switch back.

      Cost: From ~$20 to ~$30 USD -- depending on the seller.

      Disclaimer: I haven't used this...just passing it along. All BIOS upgrades I've done were for minor BIOS revisions or (if beta) after a few others had upgraded. Because of that, a BIOS backup tool like BIOS Savior is really overkill. For LinuxBIOS or other drastic changes, it sounds like an ideal tool.

      [ Parent ]
      • Re:Cool but.... by miketang16 (Score:1) Wednesday November 27 2002, @06:29AM
    • Re:Cool but.... by fitten (Score:1) Monday November 25 2002, @01:14PM
      • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.

  • Great!!!! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Annoyed Coward (620173) on Monday November 25 2002, @05:56AM (#4750070) Homepage Journal
    This will prove to be an important step. Replacing closed source system is going to happen piece by piece. And more important, the BIOS comes under close scrutiny of brilliant pool of open source community.

  • What is the benefit of this? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by DJPenguin (17736) on Monday November 25 2002, @05:58AM (#4750074)
    ... it's not as if you can buy motherboards that have no BIOS! :)

    Or is it just for apps like bochs that need an implementation of a BIOS on software?

  • What happens to the old BIOS? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by The Original Yama (454111) on Monday November 25 2002, @05:59AM (#4750082) Homepage
    If you install this, do you lose your old BIOS? For example, if I install it to my ASUS board, will it eliminate my ability to go to the BIOS setup menus? What happens to my ability to change the jumper settings through software?

  • Irony (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 25 2002, @06:01AM (#4750086)
    OK, this is cool and all, but the quote:

    Ironically, twenty years ago this month Compaq introduced their Compaq portable computer with the first BIOS outside of IBM

    uses the idea of irony incorrectly, as many many people seem to do. It does not mean "coincidentally", as it is being used here. A sword swallower choking on a toothpick is irony. Completing a project 20 years after something similar was done is not.
    • Re:Irony by zollman (Score:1) Monday November 25 2002, @08:53AM
    • Re:Irony by enneff (Score:2) Monday November 25 2002, @09:13AM
      • Re:Irony by sparkane (Score:2) Monday November 25 2002, @09:51AM
    • Re:Irony by NFNNMIDATA (Score:1) Monday November 25 2002, @10:32AM
    • You've been . . . by kfg (Score:1) Monday November 25 2002, @04:50PM
    • Re:Irony by cloudmaster (Score:1) Tuesday November 26 2002, @09:06AM
    • Re:AHHHHHHHH! by DJPenguin (Score:1) Monday November 25 2002, @08:23AM
      • Re:AHHHHHHHH! by Tim Browse (Score:2) Monday November 25 2002, @12:08PM
    • Re:Irony by Tim Browse (Score:2) Monday November 25 2002, @12:11PM
    • Re:Irony by ahfoo (Score:2) Monday November 25 2002, @12:49PM
    • No, not a grammer Nazi by kfg (Score:2) Monday November 25 2002, @04:57PM
    • No, not a grammer Nazi by kfg (Score:2) Monday November 25 2002, @05:02PM
    • 5 replies beneath your current threshold.
  • Replacing the BIOS with an open source alternative is more a ideological victory than a practical one. But considering how large impact the first reverse engineered PC BIOS [wikipedia.org] has had in the advance of personal computers, this is a important step for the whole OS movement.

  • a few questions... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by xirtam_work (560625) on Monday November 25 2002, @06:08AM (#4750109)
    Will this be able to support special features on each motherboard that are present in a manufacturers own bios such as temperature sensors, clock speeds, case security features, etc.?

    Will we be able to 'plug-in' support for booting from external devices like usb/firewire drives, flash cards, pcmcia devices, usb memory keys, and transparently make them look like a normal floppy/hdd.

    Will this now make booting from a CD an older machine that doesn't presently possible?

    Will I be able to replace the linuxbio with the original again if everything buggers up?

    What about so called dual bios systems?

  • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.

  • Palladium (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anarchofascist (4820) on Monday November 25 2002, @06:08AM (#4750111) Homepage Journal
    Does anyone know if this helps us in the war against Palladium and DRM?

    • Re:Palladium (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 25 2002, @06:18AM (#4750151)
      If anything, I would say, it actually will _help_ Palladium and DRM. Palladium and DRM need to secure that they're running on trusted hardware to make sure they're not running inside a virtual machine, which would make the whole point of security moot.

      Actually, the project's homepage [umd.edu] says:

      We will begin by augmenting the LinuxBIOS source, in conjunction with the core developers of LinuxBIOS, with the AEGIS secure bootstrap implementation. AEGIS provides provable integrity guarantees, under the assumption of the physical security of the system in question, through the application of induction and strong cryptographic checks.


      So, open source or not, this will help you make sure that the hardware you're running on really is the hardware you're running on and hence to be trusted. Will that help against Palladium and DRM? I guess not...
      [ Parent ]

      • Re:Palladium (Score:5, Interesting)

        by AuMatar (183847) on Monday November 25 2002, @06:44AM (#4750217)
        However, Palladium needs support in the BIOS level, IIRC. Without it, the OS can either pretend to have Palladium. Or the BIOS can trick the OS into believing that Palladium is oking everything. Palladium requires every link in the chain to be DRM compliant. With our own BIOS, we can now destroy a link even if the OS becomes mandated to contain DRM by law.
        [ Parent ]
        • Re:Palladium by SmittyTheBold (Score:2) Monday November 25 2002, @12:20PM
          • Re:Palladium by AuMatar (Score:1) Monday November 25 2002, @12:42PM
            • Re:Palladium by SmittyTheBold (Score:2) Tuesday November 26 2002, @02:43PM

        • Re:Palladium (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Sentry21 (8183) on Monday November 25 2002, @01:03PM (#4752511) Journal
          I prefer to look at it as 'With our own BIOS, we can now invoke Palladium on our terms'

          If I'm running a server, I can enable Palladium, and require that all code be signed with my key, and thus that h4x0rz can't execute arbitrary code on my system. I could compile my kernels, sign them, move them over to the server, and install them when I want to upgrade. No one else can.

          This is, of course, assuming that it would all work the way I think it will, but who knows? Maybe we'd have to do another step (flash a chip or something) to get it working.

          Still, this is an important step in many many ways. Kudos to all those involved, good job guys.

          --Dan
          [ Parent ]
        • Re:Palladium by Wesley Felter (Score:2) Monday November 25 2002, @09:01PM
      • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
    • Re:Palladium by IamTheRealMike (Score:2) Monday November 25 2002, @07:35AM

  • what about TCPA, palladium? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Make (95577) <max@@@duempel...org> on Monday November 25 2002, @06:10AM (#4750121) Homepage
    will this conflict with microsoft's palladium plans? sounds like yes. will microsoft try to boycott this project? (rhethorical question..)

  • This Is Not An Announcement (Score:4, Informative)

    by DarkZero (516460) on Monday November 25 2002, @06:13AM (#4750132)
    Look at the mailing list that this is on: Linuxbios. The /. story acts like this is some sort of big announcement or press release, but it's really just the mailing list version of a standard WIP page [mame.net]. They're not being pretentious about it or patting themselves on the back, but the person that submitted this story certainly is.

  • Boch's website: (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 25 2002, @06:13AM (#4750134)
    is here [sourceforge.net].

  • This is great news! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by stevezero (620090) on Monday November 25 2002, @06:16AM (#4750142)
    As an 'end user' I would rather deal with multi-booting a computer without using LILO or GRUB.

    However, I have a few concerns, not on the technical side, but on the political/corporate side (and no, this is not a troll...sheesh)

    - Will Microsoft, in its zeal to maintain some semblance of control, seek to disable Windows from using motherboards with this bios...perhaps as one of their many 'updates'?

    - If Microsoft pushes forward their "trusted computing" through Palladium, how does this affect this project?

    - Since this appears to be a government-funded project, will Microsoft scream that this is unfair (not that they have a point, but will they?). Since the US government seems to be unable to discipline the company, I'm wondering how much power they REALLY have over the government.

    - Will this project eventually woo motherboard manufacturers were to leave the various BIOS companies (Award, etc.)?

    Sheesh, that was a lot of questions about M$, but I'm not obsessed (sharpening ax on grindstone)

  • Prohibited by palladium (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Erpo (237853) on Monday November 25 2002, @06:17AM (#4750147)
    This is great and all, but don't expect to be able to use it if MS's palladium system is successful. In a palladium pc, the bios serves as part of the Core Trusted Root for Measurement, meaning that installing an open-source, unsigned alternative is not an option. This is not a soft option, like installing an unsigned OS -- a palladium system will let you install any software you want, including an operating system, but it won't allow unsigned code to use its "secure" features (including access to its stored machine-specific private key used for encrypting machine-specific content, or the sign-only key pair used exclusively for validating the machine's trusted status).

    On the other hand, unsigned bioses are strictly not allowed. The bios is one of many hardware weak spots in palladium that, if compromised in an "adversarial environment" (yes, that's what they call it. ;) ) such as your home, would allow the user to totally subvert any security measure in place. Of course, palladium will be laughably easy to get past with direct unrestricted access to the physical device (as with EVERY Digital Restriction Mechanism), but it won't be legal to do so. Unless you perform an illegal (and risky if you're not an electronics guru) hardware mod, you won't be able to run (or rather, install) LinuxBIOS.

    The only way you'll see LinuxBIOS on a palladium machine would be if

    <disclaimer>
    Yeah, I clicked the link and read the page, but I didn't go further and investigate the features offered by LinuxBIOS.
    </disclaimer>

    a motherboard company took the LinuxBIOS source, modified it to lock out the user and perform DRM functions, and submitted it to MS for signing. Then LinuxBIOS could be installed in a palladium machine. Of course, the mobo company would still have to release the source code to their mod under the GPL, but that's not going to do the end user any good -- it won't get them a signed AND free bios. Remember all those stories about DRM killing OSS? Well, they were exaggerated for the most part, but this is what they were talking about.

    The point is, if we don't get the word out about palladium, it will be illegal to use this bios in its free state. That's the least of our worries.
    • Re:Prohibited by palladium by IamTheRealMike (Score:2) Monday November 25 2002, @07:38AM
      • circumvention by Erpo (Score:2) Monday November 25 2002, @01:30PM

    • GPL'ed BIOS not compatible with palladium (Score:5, Informative)

      by dmoen (88623) on Monday November 25 2002, @08:27AM (#4750606) Homepage
      I think the GPL prohibits the following:

      If a motherboard company took the LinuxBIOS source, modified it to lock out the user and perform DRM functions, and submitted it to MS for signing. Then LinuxBIOS could be installed in a palladium machine. Of course, the mobo company would still have to release the source code to their mod under the GPL, but that's not going to do the end user any good -- it won't get them a signed AND free bios.

      The GPL requires that you distribute *all* of the sources used to generate an executable. In this case, the executable includes a digital signature (it isn't runnable without the digital signature), and the source used to generate that digital signature is Microsoft's private key. (note: IANAL)

      Doug Moen.

      [ Parent ]

    • Re:Prohibited by palladium (Score:4, Insightful)

      by puppetluva (46903) on Monday November 25 2002, @09:32AM (#4751015)
      Palladium has less to do with DRM than it has to do with Microsoft wanting to control the hardware manufacturers.

      Think about it. Microsoft can punish Dell by disallowing their BIOS interoperability with their Palladium platform.

      They've already dominated UP the stack (used their OS to monopolize the app vendors), now they are going DOWN the stack (using their OS monopoly to dominate the hardware vendors).

      Palladium is the worst thing for computing freedom we've seen yet.
      [ Parent ]
      • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
    • Re:Prohibited by palladium by Wesley Felter (Score:2) Monday November 25 2002, @09:13PM
      • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
    • 2 replies beneath your current threshold.

  • Great.... But why? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by johnburton (21870) <johnb@jbmail.com> on Monday November 25 2002, @06:18AM (#4750149) Homepage
    So you can replace the perfectly good bios that comes with your pc with one that might work almost as well if you are very lucky and happen to have exactly the right hardware and software. The question "Why?" springs to mind here?

  • virtual machine within BIOS (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jki (624756) on Monday November 25 2002, @06:18AM (#4750150) Homepage
    Sorry if this sounds like sci-fi, but I have started lately thinking whether it would be possible to launch a tiny REAL OS from within/integrated with the BIOS. A bit like vmware [vmware.com] but on a even lower level - I am thinking this might start being possible now that BIOS capabilities are increasing all the time as well. This would provide many interesting possibilities. Do you see this impossible for some reason? The vmware page says : "VMware technology is patented and patent-pending" - does anyone know exactly which patents they have and what limitations do those pose.

    • Re:virtual machine within BIOS (Score:5, Informative)

      by nomadicGeek (453231) on Monday November 25 2002, @07:59AM (#4750489)
      This has already been done a couple of times.

      There is a software product called Steeplechase that is used for PC based control. It loads a Real Time OS first. This handles all of the control application. Windows NT/2000 is then run as a low priority process of the RTOS. It allows the control application to respond to real time constraints and products the control application from a Windows crash.

      I believe that one of the Linux RTOS solutions uses a very similar approach.

      I also believe that this is how the VMware GSX server product works.
      [ Parent ]
      • Re:virtual machine within BIOS by jki (Score:2) Monday November 25 2002, @08:10AM
      • Re:virtual machine within BIOS by chrisv (Score:1) Monday November 25 2002, @01:18PM
      • RTlinux by Hangman Jim 99 (Score:2) Monday November 25 2002, @03:07PM

        • Re:RTlinux (Score:4, Interesting)

          by nomadicGeek (453231) on Monday November 25 2002, @05:19PM (#4754473)
          It looks like the fsmlabs product has come a long way. It is really great that they make it available for free. I think that this approach has several advantages over the Steeplechase system in that you can probably do a lot more with the RTOS. The Steeplechase RTOS was limited.

          Unfortunately, Steeplechase didn't make any money. There were licensing costs with the Radisys kernel and most professional controls folks were afraid for PC based control. I have to admit that I would probably limit my exposure to things like data acquisition and small controls projects. Many of the things that I work on tend to go boom or release dangerous chemicals when they fail.

          The last thing that I used Steeplechase for was NASA's Payload Ground Handling Mechanism that loads payloads into the space shuttle. We used Steeplchase as a watchdog over the motion controllers. It compared operator input to the motion of the gantry and hit the kill switch if the motion controller seemed to be out of control. It worked very well in that application.

          As far as cost, Steeplechase was competitive. It cost about the same to buy the I/O and software as it did to purchase a PLC.
          [ Parent ]
    • Re:virtual machine within BIOS by Matthias Wiesmann (Score:2) Monday November 25 2002, @08:06AM
    • Re:virtual machine within BIOS by jki (Score:2) Monday November 25 2002, @04:00PM
    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.

  • Fully OpenSource PCs? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Big Mark (575945) <m_t_douglas&hotmail,com> on Monday November 25 2002, @06:26AM (#4750169)
    Will there be any OpenSourced hardware for these things to run on?

    Think about it: all I hear the OpenSource monkeys chatering about is OpenSource software (from Linux kernels and KDE to bare-metal stuff like this). All the hardware these things run on is just as proprietary as Windows XP.

    Now, while you can unscrew the case and have a peer inside (much as true programming gurus can see what a program does by doing cat /bin/ls | less ) you can't see what hardware bugs exist except by inferring their existance from their effects. Why don't people start designing open-source CPUs, chipsets etc?

    Of course, as there aren't all that many chip fabrication plants around we will have to rely on Intel and friends (enemies ?) taking the GPL/BSD/MIT/insert favourite licence here chip designs, making them and flogging them for loads (captive market, y'see. "Here is the chip design, you want this in Socket 468 format give us three hundred dollars". I think that the GPL allows that). I'm not all that sure how these licences would apply to chip designs but still. There must be some chip design geniuses out there who aren't employed by AMD and by making a few chip designs GPLd they could change the way the computing world operates. And get a high-paying job out of it as well ;-). It would mean an end to Pentium F00F-style bugs, at least...

    Just a few thoughts, I doubt it will ever happen but still...

    -Mark

  • Actually (Score:5, Informative)

    by Konster (252488) on Monday November 25 2002, @06:53AM (#4750240)
    This is fairly interesting. The board that they managed to boot is based upon the SiS 630e chip, which supports Pentium III/Celeron CPUs up to 1 GHz. I imagine you can scrounge one of these up with a Celeron for about $100. I wouldn't want to test this out on anything that isn't disposable and isn't anything other than a test platform. Still, having a spare BIOS chip laying around wouldn't hurt either. I wouldn't recommend trying this on any old board with any old chipset, unless you are willing to lose functionality of it either temporarily or permanently. A failed BIOS flash means that your system will have no way of bootstrapping itself unless you have a spare BIOS chip laying around (peovided that no hardware was damaged). This BIOS chip should have the BIOS version suitable for the board its made for. If you don't have access to a BIOS chip programmer, and you are somewhat of a cowboy, and you didn't reboot the PC with the failed BIOS flash, AND if you have a BIOS chip that is compatible with the one in the machine, gently pull the fragged BIOS out, put the new on in and flash it back to the factory AMI BIOS. BIOS r Fun. I hate them.
    • Re:Actually by Lumpy (Score:3) Monday November 25 2002, @09:40AM
      • Re:Actually by tzanger (Score:1) Monday November 25 2002, @12:46PM
        • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
      • Re:Actually by mamba-mamba (Score:2) Monday November 25 2002, @03:35PM

  • Betcha... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Amadodd (620353) on Monday November 25 2002, @07:02AM (#4750259)
    China would love this. Another step closer to paying no techno tax to the west.

  • Palladium for linux? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 25 2002, @07:26AM (#4750348)
    Has anyone actually read the links? [umd.edu] This isn't the linuxBios project [lanl.gov], it's a seperate project that adds 'trusted boot' to it.

    From the umd site:
    "Upon the completion of our research, open and closed source operating systems will have a high assurance bootstrap process available on a wide array of personal computer systems. In addition, the bootstrap process will include the capability for using cryptographic hardware-- in some cases tamper resistant. Providing a ``true'' trusted path from the power switch to the Operating System."

    Sound familliar?

  • how about bugs? (Score:4, Funny)

    by zloppy303 (411053) on Monday November 25 2002, @07:35AM (#4750382)
    After the upgrade:

    Hmmm.... computer doesn't boot anymore, lets send in a bug report... errrmm..... ;)

  • Could this be adapted for the Xbox? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by salimfadhley (565599) <ip@st o d g e . org> on Monday November 25 2002, @08:30AM (#4750618) Homepage Journal
    Imagine if this could be made to work on an MS Xbox? It would transform that clunky Halo-player into a practical work computer - or even an affordable clustering machine.

  • FSF's computers have never been free? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by usrdk (629154) on Monday November 25 2002, @09:06AM (#4750820)
    So this got me thinking...

    When the FSF says that their computers only run free software, they are "forgetting" the fact that they've needed the proprietary BIOS (until now, maybe)?

    Flawed logic from the FSF?

  • What about a true console port? (Score:1)

    by kennedy (18142) on Monday November 25 2002, @10:08AM (#4751243) Homepage
    This is a really cool start, but would it be possible to intergrate real console port support?!

    The x86 platform *really* could use something like that, especally if it's tied to Linux or one of the other many unix and unix like flavors on x86.

  • They used Bochs? (Score:2)

    by evilviper (135110) on Monday November 25 2002, @11:09AM (#4751657) Journal
    Call me crazy, but it doesn't seem like they've done anything too exciting. I mean, Bochs already emulates a full x86 PC, it doesn't seem like it would take a genius to use that code to replace part of a real PC.

  • Desperately needed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SurfsUp (11523) on Monday November 25 2002, @11:51AM (#4751986)
    Bios development has stagnated. Actually, it stagnated immediately after the Phoenix, Award etc bioses came out in 1982. Since then, bioses have stayed essentially as awkward, feature-limited and buggy as ever. Minor improvements: guess the hard drive geometry, whoopie. Choices of and control over boot devices are still pathetically limited, and the way bios extensions are integrated (e.g., Intel boot agent, yuck) is user-offensive.

    1) I want to boot off my compact flash reader for crying out loud, how hard is that? Will you show me an Award or Phoenix bios that can do it?

    2) I want just one pause at boot where I can select either which OS configuration to boot, or alternatively, bios configuration. Not endless droning sequences of "now you can hit F2 to configure bios", "now you can hit Ctrl-S to configure PXE", "now you can hit Ctrl-R to configure raid". As a user interface that's just miserable. You have to sit their staring at the monitor waiting for just the right 2 seconds to hit exactly the right key, and if you miss, it's back to the beginning for you. With some boots taking two minutes that turns into a major timewaster. How hard is it to provide a framework so the OS boot selection and bios configuration are on the same menu? Answer: not hard, unless your name is Award or Phoenix.

    The Bios used to be a convenient place for OEMs to hide crucial configuration details, keeping it all in the familly so to speak, but since that stuff has been largely decoded by OSS hordes and is ignored by Windows in favor built-in drivers, it's become increasing pointless. The bios has gone back to being what it always should have been: a way to boot. But the bioses served up to us by the incumbent manufacturers aren't even good at that.

    Hence the need for OSS to invade that bastion of proprietary, closed code which once seemed to mysterious. It's not any more, simply because of the relentless pressure for components to standardize. It's now possible to write a bios that relies on such standard features as pci topology discovery to do its work.

    At the very least, the general availablity of community-developed, peer-reviewed bioses will force the leading bios vendors to get off their tails and fix up their code to be less pathetically unusable than it is at present. At best, we're shortly arriving at the time where reflashing your bios is the very next thing you do after loading in the Linux installation CD.

  • An MIT or Apache-style license would be better. (Score:1)

    by Brett Glass (98525) on Monday November 25 2002, @12:58PM (#4752482) Homepage
    It seems to me that the GPL is the wrong license for a BIOS.

    You see, a BIOS is not like an operating system, where 99.99% of users and vendors use the same exact version. (They change the application software that runs above it, but not the OS itself.) But vendors just about ALWAYS have to modify a BIOS to fit their specific hardware. And there's really no other practical way to do this other than to insert code directly into the BIOS itself. Code that must be modified in this way to be useful should really be licensed under an MIT/Apache-style license, so that anyone can do this without any constraints or special obligations.

    An Apache/MIT license would also allow vendors to differentiate their products from their competitors' -- and might help them to survive in the face of stiff competition from the behemoths of the computing world. One reason why VA Linux's hardware business failed (and was shut down last year) is that VA was unable to distinguish their generic "white boxes" from other folks' products. One of the ways they might have been able to do it would have been to provide an especially good BIOS, BIOS support for unique peripherals or motherboard features, and/or special BIOS enhancements.

    Under the GPL, one can't do this because any competitor can copy what you do. But under an MIT or Apache-style license, it would be possible for manufacturers to make mods to the BIOS without being forced to "donate" their hard work to rapacious competitors (including the big guys, such as Dell and HP).

    Thus, it seems to me that an open source BIOS should be licensed under a license that allows maximum freedom, such as the Apache, MIT, or Artistic License.

  • Practical benefits... (Score:1)

    by p_trinli (463461) on Monday November 25 2002, @11:58PM (#4756687)
    This actually has huge practical benefits. LinuxBIOS like derivatives are used in tons of embedded projects. I can go from powerup to multitasking Linux kernel in about 3 seconds on a slow machine without doing a lot of optimization (ie decoding the kernel out of flash) I bet I could drop that the about 1.5 seconds if needed. init is running within about 5 seconds as is.

  • Re:The US military (Score:1)

    by denny_d (454663) on Monday November 25 2002, @11:47AM (#4751959)
    Yeh, well I can take a guess. If you recall a week ago maybe, there was a posting on micro sensors? These little devices need a secure boot up and they may need to boot up all at the same time for a variety of reasons.

    So having one bios for all devices in the field makes that a simpler process. I'd bet good money they are using a bit of xml in the bios for synching purposes.

    read the link they provided:
    http://www.missl.cs.umd.edu/Projects/se bos/main.sh tml
    [ Parent ]
  • 13 replies beneath your current threshold.

  • All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2010 Geeknet, Inc.