LinuxBIOS Ready To Go Mainstream

[Justin Zygmont]

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.