On Thu, Sep 09, 2004 at 06:59:24PM -0700, linuxg33k wrote:
From everything that I have read, I am understanding that basically its a faster bios that jumps to the distros bootloader when done? Or does this redefine the bootup process where the linuxbios is the bootloader and upon coming to life jumps straight to the distro kernel? If it jumps to the distro bootloader surely the time savings are a few seconds at best? If linuxbios takes over some of the bootloader functions, how does this affect a typicall install if at all?
LinuxBIOS (plus the payload) will get you as far as loading your linux kernel. It doesn't do anything for speeding up the time from loading of kernel to launching of process 1, or the time from launching of process 1 to usability. _However_, it's actually a relatively simple process to get from jumping to the kernel to, for instance, a directfb based GUI in under 3 seconds, so those few seconds LinuxBIOS saves you can make a big, big difference.
A lot of the focus of LinuxBIOS has not been around improved boot times, which is why stuff like the EPIA-M's terrible boot time has gone unfixed (there are sleeps in there, and also it defaults to a compressed linuxbios image) but you take what you can get with free software, at least linuxbios is GPLed, so if you care enough you can fix it yourself and contribute those changes back for everyone else.