Welcome to coreboot

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Revision as of 19:20, 7 September 2005 by Rminnich (talk | contribs)
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The wiki is being retired!

Documentation is now handled by the same processes we use for code: Add something to the Documentation/ directory in the coreboot repo, and it will be rendered to https://doc.coreboot.org/. Contributions welcome!

Welcome to the LinuxBIOS homepage

LinuxBIOS Summit Oct. 11-13, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. See http://lacsi.rice.edu/symposium/ for information. Richard Bruner, AMD Fellow, will be a featured speaker. We have a number of interesting speakers lined up, and will be describing new developments, such as the use of Linux Kconfig for LinuxBIOS configuration. Hope too see you there!

LinuxBIOS is a Free Software project aimed at replacing the normal BIOS with a little bit of hardware initialization and a compressed Linux kernel that can be booted from a cold start. The project was started as part of clustering research work in the Cluster Reseach Lab at the Advanced Computing Laboratory at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The primary motivation behind the project was the desire to have the operating system gain control of a cluster node from power on. Other beneficial consequences of using LinuxBIOS include needing only two working motors to boot (cpu fan and power supply), fast boot times (current fastest is 3 seconds), and freedom from proprietary (buggy) BIOS code, to name a few. These secondary benefits are numerous and have helped gain support from many vendors in both the high performance computing as well as embedded computing markets.

Note that, on newer systems, there need be no moving parts at all. At LANL, we are building a new 'no moving parts' 16-node cluster to demonstrate this capability. The cluster will fit in a toolbox, run from a battery, boot in 10 seconds, and be controlled from your laptop (which, sadly, will still have a few moving parts).