[LinuxBIOS] Overview

[m at de-minimis.co.uk]

Dear All,

I'm completely new to LinuxBios, and I'm trying to understand exactly what 
it does, and what it offers.  Trying to decide exactly how interested I 
am.  Could you please forgive my ignorance and clarify the following for 
me please:

Does LinuxBios run on the main processor or on some auxiliary processor?

What is the typical power consumption of a LinuxBios moboard running the 
minimum number of devices to do basic communication over ethernet - 
hopefully only the moboard and the network card if it isn't already on the 
moboard will require power, then I need to know processor consumption - 
here the earlier question about what does the processing becomes relevant.

Can LinuxBios be used to do complicated wake-on lan?  Here minimal power 
consumption in the idle state becomes important to me.  (question of 
fairly high interest to me)

Does LinuxBios help with running multiple operating systems 
simultaneously? (high interest)

Does it accelerate booting, because where previously first the bios 
loaded, then grub, then the OS proper, now perhaps booting can go straight 
from LinuxBios to OS?

How often can one typically write to the bios before it won't take any 
more changes?  I understand it's flash, so I expect few thousand times, 
more if one rotates which memory blocks one uses, but on the other hand 
this isn't exactly flash that is designed to be rewritten very often, as 
far as I understand anyway!  Can one fairly easily and at a competitive 
price buy replacement chips?

I very much appreciate any help you can give, because you've already done 
this kind of stuff.

A short introduction is probably in order:  I'm a mathematician, so a bit 
of an amateur where computer science is concerned.  I'm getting into 
writing linux device drivers at the moment.

Best Wishes, Max