Greetings,
My finding (as a commercial LinuxBIOS supplier in clusters) is that the cost difference is quite small vs booting from cf or PXE boot, etc. The big benefit in clusters is that the boot becomes MUCH more reliable.
LinuxBIOS never 'forgets' that serial console is needed, and never stops for the user to press 'any key' (and no keyboard in sight).
In other cases, I find boards that have good hardware and a good value but bugs in the BIOS make it unusable w/o LinuxBIOS.
Of course, having the source opens a number of AFAIK unexplored options for secure netbooting. G'day, sjames
On Mon, 9 Dec 2002, Andrew Kohlsmith wrote:
It's Ron's privilege to name the project as he sees fit, but when people first see "LinuxBIOS", misinterpretation does seem to be common. "LinuxBIOS" does *not* mean "a BIOS for Linux" - for one thing, Linux does needs no BIOS. The project's original intention was to put Linux in a mobo rom *instead* of a legacy PC BIOS.
Personally when I first heard of LinuxBIOS I wondered what the usefulness of such a thing was. Yeah fast boots, but how is that any cheaper to buy motherboards with DoC media than to put an 8M CF card in a CF-IDE adaptor and boot from that?
Now in quantity (i.e. clusters) I think that LinuxBIOS is probably cheaper in the long run (I'm sure that Ron's done all of these analyses and so forth since it appears it's for government use) and I really am glad that Ron and the toher contributors have done what they did. It's always embarassing to write off something as being fringe and then a year or so later find yourself asking questions about it because you need to use it yourself. :-)
Regards, Andrew _______________________________________________ Linuxbios mailing list Linuxbios@clustermatic.org http://www.clustermatic.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxbios