LinuxBIOS: the future of booting PCs?
Today we have 2 main computer booting systems, namly PC-BIOS and EFI, the former mostly driven by Phoenix, AMI and Award, and used in practically every PC sold since the late 80's, and the latter primarily used by Apple in their Macs.
The problems with PC-BIOS are numerous, firstly, it's all done in assembly code, while this keeps the code size compact, it's hard to read, port to other processor architectures, and thus debug, it's more difficult to keep it in a modularised form, and it has no true central code base, the PC-BIOS is basically in a constant state of forking.
Intel created EFI to address these problems, however it has roots in DRM/Treacherous computing, and has a very messy API, some even refer to it as a "bad OS".
There has been a project in the works for a number of years called LinuxBIOS, some bright sparks thought "Instead of replacing the BIOS with a bad OS, why not use a good OS that has drivers already written for it". While great in theory, LinuxBIOS has had a number of implementation problems they had to get around. For those of you that don't know, LinuxBIOS has been running for a few years now on things from TV sets to Supercomputing clusters
However recently an AMD engineer released a LinuxBIOS that works with Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4, the first AM2 motherboard to work with the advanced BIOS. AMD has even commented on the efficenty of the LinuxBIOS Hypertransport code.
Unfortunately Intel hasn't been forthcoming with their chipset documentation, so we wont be seeing LinuxBIOS on Intel boards for some time, however, with nVidia's interest peeked, we may see LinuxBIOS for 680i MCPs sometime in the future.
Here's a list of motherboards known to work with LinuxBIOS:
http://linuxbios.org/Supported_Motherboards
And here's a video of Ronald Minnich's presentation of LinuxBIOS at this years FOSDEM meeting at Brussels encoded in Ogg/Theora:
http://ftp.belnet.be/mirrors/FOSDEM/...-LinuxBios.ogg
So what do you think folks, is LinuxBIOS the way of the future?