Re: Clean BIOS booting Mandrake 9 via LILO

> By the way, the LinuxBIOS people announced today that their BIOS was
> even able to boot Windows 2000 now. Their BIOS includes parts of the
> Bochs BIOS, too.

I've been following LinuxBIOS for a bit, so I'll add a biographical note
on LinuxBIOS for those not familiar with it. The original idea of
LinuxBIOS was not "A BIOS for Linux", rather "Linux instead of the PC
BIOS" - i.e. make Linux self-sufficient of PC BIOS calls and then flash
the kernel into the motherboard rom and boot it directly.

Ron Minnich at LANL started the project and is still only really
bothered about booting large clusters. Others have different priorities,
and LinuxBIOS is now turning into a general purpose chipset support
library for other firmware, the first example being Etherboot. At least
one chipset vendor (SiS) actively supports LinuxBIOS and so do a couple
of embedded systems vendors. Several more chipset vendors have released
enough information for a port.

LinuxBIOS itself contains no "traditional" BIOS in the sense that PC
users mean. The hot news is that the SEBOS guys made the glue for Bochs
BIOS to use real chipsets (rather than Bochs emulation) with the help of
LinuxBIOS. They report that Bochs's abstraction is just right for them
to just plug in, so that their fixes are genuine contributions to Bochs.
Details at <http://www.missl.cs.umd.edu/Projects/sebos/phase2.shtml>.

A few weeks ago there was some debate about the relevance of LinuxBIOS
on Xbox. Well the upshot is that any hardware supported by LinuxBIOS can
now boot Win 2K (and soon probably the other flavours).  So if anyone
feels motivated to port it, Xbox can have Etherboot [*], Bochs BIOS (and
hence Windows[**]), Linux in flash[***] and any other neat stuff which
sits on LinuxBIOS.

[*] I think a network card driver should be feasible, but note that
despite its name, Etherboot has an IDE driver (not reliant on BIOS
calls) so that it can boot Linux directly from disk.

[**] Booting Windows 2000 may be OT to Linux on the Xbox, but we all
know that MS is *really* afraid of giving away hardware which runs
'doze. :) It would be a fun project just to see how Gates reacts.

[***] I gather that one of the characteristics of the Xbox is oodles of
flash, so it should be ideal for this.




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