Benefits

Note: This page is work in progress!

Benefits

• 100% Free Software (GPL), no royalties, no license fees!
• Fast boot times (3 seconds from power-on to Linux console)
• Avoids the need for a slow, buggy, proprietary BIOS
• Runs in 32-Bit protected mode almost from the start
• Written in C, contains virtually no assembly code
• Supports a wide variety of hardware and payloads
• Further features: netboot, serial console, remote flashing, ...

Possible Advantages

• Some BIOSes don't enable hardware virtualization features (AMD / Intel), thus you cannot use that feature of your hardware (e.g. for XEN, KVM, etc).
• Some BIOSes don't enable HPET (can be used by Linux for enhanced power-saving features, e.g. on laptops), see linuxpowertop.org.
• TPMs...

All of this is (or can be) fixed in LinuxBIOS, as it's open source. With a proprietary BIOS you're dependant on the good-will of the vendor to fix these issues.

LinuxBIOS features proprietary BIOSes usually lack

• Boot from NAND Flash (and other nonstandard media), which most proprietary BIOSes don't support
• Debugging output on the serial console
• ...

Some anecdotes where LinuxBIOS saved the day

• The "Press F1 to continue" error on a cluster (without a single keyboard attached).
• Improved Fan control behaviour: http://www.linuxbios.org/pipermail/linuxbios/2007-May/021049.html
• On the VIA EPIA MII-6000 and the EPIA-10000 LinuxBIOS can boot from CompactFlash, whereas the proprietary BIOS is known to not support this.
• ...