Here is what I am told by commercial companies, building products, who need to use LinuxBIOS: If you have a credible business case for LinuxBIOS on Intel systems, Intel will help you with LinuxBIOS. This was also covered at a talk at the LinuxBIOS summit last year. I am told that Intel continues to be helpful to individual companies, having a credible business case, who contact them for help on LinuxBIOS ports. The help does not extend to programming support, just provision of documents. When it comes to coding, you are on your own.
Thus, if you are a serious commerical customer with an opporuntity that is measured in a reasonable number of units (and Intel has been helpful in sales as small as 2000 units), then I think you should contact your Intel rep, tell them what you want to do, and ask for help in the form of documents and sample code; also, make it clear that the code you produce will be GPL and released to the world, as it will be part of LinuxBIOS. Be honest with them; do not try to be tricky.
Based on what a couple of companies have told me, I think Intel might help out. Intel has not directly helped the LinuxBIOS community for over 4 years now, in fact quite the opposite, but evidently they do occasionally help companies.
I would be interested in hearing how it goes for you if you contact Intel. If anyone has experiences to report we would be interested in hearing them here. Of course, AMD continues to be the gold standard for LinuxBIOS support, as you can see from their slides at the LinuxBIOS meeting last month (on the web site); and the fact that one of our most prominent contributors is an AMD employee!
As for commercial %: LinuxBIOS usage is so close to 100% commercial use, that the other uses (including the thousands of machines here at LANL) do not even count any more; we're lost in the noise. At one point, LANL was 100% of the worldwide installed base of LinuxBIOS. Now we don't even count -- we're way too small.
thanks
ron