Moving motherboard BIOS to embedded Linux BIOS
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The BIOS of a PC can and should be moved to Linux.
e.g. http://www.coreboot.org
The benefit is that arm netbooks and PCs can then
have the same BIOS. With a few compiler switches
they can be configured to any other processor improvements.
Manufacturers of main boards for netbooks, smartbooks,
PCs both ARM and Intel will be faced with overal
less work in producing and releasing maintenance code
for the added expense of a little extra flash which costs
practically nothing as a percentage of the main board cost.
And also they can boot Linux directly from first having
booted off the embedded Linux BIOS and jump strait
to numerous other devices that are considered to be
generally not bootable. For example, a 32Gb SD card
could ship with 1% of the memory dedicated to a bootable
Linux OS that helps it format, view files, delete files
and do other stuff without the need for the buyer
to be putting in software manually get all those functions.
If you are a camera maker, now you could have the Linux BIOS
to boot your camera and then it could jump straight into the
SDCard built in Linux OS to do all the fancy stuff of formatting
and viewing cards and so on!
Huge amount of features can be added to gadgets without the need
for manufactures having to putting it into the product itself
and endlessly duplicating the effort across lots of different models.
Every Linux based product could benefit. For example a flat TV
could have its BIOS for the OSD made of Linux and if it had
a SDCard slot, then when you plug in the SDCard with the Linux
on it, it could boot and run the Linux OS on it and display
all the pictures and so on. Its no longer a function that
every TV maker has to worry about to put into their TV to get
the extra marketing talk points.
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