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[News] Linux/FOSS could be the future of the BIOS

  • Subject: [News] Linux/FOSS could be the future of the BIOS
  • From: "[H]omer" <spam@xxxxxxx>
  • Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2007 19:26:54 +0100
  • Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
  • Openpgp: id=BF436EC9; url=http://slated.org/files/GPG-KEY-SLATED.asc
  • Organization: Slated.org
  • User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070811 Remi/2.0.0.6-1.fc6.remi Thunderbird/2.0.0.6 Mnenhy/0.7.5.666
  • Xref: ellandroad.demon.co.uk comp.os.linux.advocacy:566500
Modern systems need not be held back by a legacy boot process:

.----
| On many systems, a large portion of boot time goes into providing
| legacy support for MS-DOS. Various projects, including LinuxBIOS
| and Open Firmware, are trying to replace the proprietary BIOS
| systems with streamlined pieces of code able to do only what is
| necessary to get a Linux® kernel loaded and running.
|
| [...]
|
| So, on a fairly heavily loaded machine, you get to wait for every
| device to probe twice. Often, the boot ROM for a SCSI controller
| takes a fairly long time to scan for devices. Worse, while the boot
| ROM is running, nothing else is. In contrast, a modern operating
| system may well load a SCSI driver, initiate a bus reset, then
| continue loading other drivers and doing other work before going
| back to check for devices. In short, the operating system's scan is
| faster than the BIOS scan.
|
| The exact speed difference depends on the operating system.
| However, we know that Linux boot-time scans can be very, very fast.
| And that means that the BIOS isn't just taking up half the time
| from power-on to the last kernel driver loaded; it's probably
| taking up a lot more. This becomes even more pronounced when less
| essential kernel modules (such as sound drivers) can be loaded
| fairly late in the boot process, possibly coming online after more
| crucial things (such as Web servers) are loaded.
|
| What we want is a way to get the kernel loaded without waiting for
| the BIOS to do a lot of the setup that the kernel is about to do --
| and do faster, better, and probably more reliably.
|
| Put the kernel in flash
|
| [...]
|
| The world would be a better place if x86 vendors started using Open
| Firmware by default.
`----

http://lxer.com/module/newswire/ext_link.php?rid=93897


Related...

ASUS Motherboard Ships With Embedded Linux, Web Browser:

.----
| At first when hearing about this Express Gate feature, we figured
| it was just some small feature being worked on by a couple ASUS
| engineers. When powering up the motherboard, we assumed you would
| just hit a key sequence and enter a quickly thrown together Linux
| environment that featured a basic web browser. Well, much to our
| surprise this was actually a finely crafted Linux desktop
| environment.
`----

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=869


Could Windows one day depend on Linux for its boot process?

-- 
K.
http://slated.org

.----
| "[Microsoft] are willing to lose money for years and years just to
|  make sure that you don't make any money, either." - Bob Cringely.
|  - http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2007/07/cringely-the-un.html
`----

Fedora release 7 (Moonshine) on sky, running kernel 2.6.22.1-41.fc7
 19:25:19 up 63 days, 18:20,  5 users,  load average: 0.04, 0.23, 0.26

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