Documentation

This page contains information on how to get started building and installing LinuxBIOS, as well as build tutorials for various specific motherboards.

Build Tutorials

• DK8HTX Build Tutorial
• X11 on EPIA-M
• SiS630
• Tyan S2881 Build Tutorial
• Tyan S2882 Build Tutorial
• QEMU Build Tutorial
• Tyan S2892 the OLPC way

Port Guides

Here are some port guides and experiences.

• LinuxBIOS on AMD64 (PDF)
• The Technoland SBC 710
• The PC CHIPS M810LR
• The EPIA-M/MII
• JTAG/BSDL Guide
• VGA support

Other Documentation

• Configuration tool manual (from freebios/Documentation/configmanual.ps)
• Project Book, Mangrove LinuxBios from Mathieu Deschamps
• LinuxBIOS Glossary
• The USB EHCI Debug Port may be the easiest way to do early debugging without a legacy serial port.
• Christer Weinigel: Doing Linux programming close to the hardware (PDF)
• Doxygen generated build documentation

Papers/Articles

FreeVGA: Architecture Independent Video Graphics Initialization for LinuxBIOS

• Li-Ta Lo, Gregory R. Watson, Ronald G. Minnich
• Usenix, February 25 2005 (??)
• [ html | pdf ]

Supermon: High performance monitoring for Linux clusters

• Ron Minnich, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Karen Reid, University of Toronto
• The Fifth Annual Linux Showcase and Conference, Oakland, CA, November 5-10 2001
• [ ps ]

LOBOS and LinuxBIOS

• Cluster Research Brochure
• prepared for SC 2000, November 4-10 2000
• [ pdf ]

The Linux BIOS

• Ron Minnich, James Hendricks, and Dale Webster, Los Alamos National Laboratory
• The Fourth Annual Linux Showcase and Conference, Atlanta, GA, October 4-11 2000
• [ pdf | ps ]

LOBOS (Linux OS Boots Linux OS): Booting a Kernel in 32-bit Mode

• Ron Minnich, Los Alamos National Laboratory
• The Fourth Annual Linux Showcase and Conference, Atlanta, GA, October 4-11 2000
• [ pdf | ps ]

Putting Linux on your motherboard

• Antony Stone
• Linux Magazine, March, 2003, Pg. 76
• [ pdf ]

Look Ma, No Bios

• Oleg Goldshmidt
• IBM Haifa Research Laboratory, July 2006
• Oleg's talks
• [ html | html.zip | ppt.zip | pdf ]

A Framework for Using Processor Cache as RAM (CAR)

• Eswaramoorthi Nallusamy
• University of New Mexico
• [ ppt ]

Books

These books do not address LinuxBIOS specifically but provide background information useful for BIOS-level programming on PC hardware.

• PCI System Architecture
• HyperTransport System Architecture
• AMD K8 Processor Architecture (white paper/book excerpt)