On Thu, 5 Sep 2002, Christer Weinigel wrote:
I think I need a short introduction to LinuxBIOS and also a short history of where it came from.
history: I started this project at LANL three years ago this month. The original purpose was to make clusters easier to manage. Clusters take 1 FTE per 128 nodes to manage at minimum, and that was no longer workable ca. 1999, as we envisioned clusters of 256 or 1024 or more nodes. At the same time, existing BIOSes were too stupid to be useful, and took a lot of effort to keep running -- I once had to do the "magic key" sequence to get 128 nodes to boot from CDROM. Remy Evard at Argonne got to move a keyboard and cart around to over 256 nodes to do a bios upgrade -- twice. Systems with existing BIOSes could not be used to build manageable clusters.
It seemed to me that with the demise of ISA and other old PC junk, and the common use of self-describing hardware, we could build an open-source BIOS. My hope was that we could further use Linux as the bootstrap and second half of the BIOS. There were thus two key questions to ask: could Linux boot Linux, and could we write an open source BIOS? If both these questions could be answered "yes", then an open-source BIOS was practical.
I spent the next few months figuring out if Linux could boot Linux. I had a fair number of core folks tell me this was impossible, but we did it anyway, and other folks have come along since and written much better systems that do the same thing (see kexec and two kernel monte and bootimg).
Once we knew linux could boot linux, it was time to check out open source bioses. James Hendrix and Dale Webster found OpenBIOS and over winter break showed that our L440GX+ boards could be booted with OpenBIOS -- from a floppy, under DOS.
The next few months were consumed with me trying to figure out how to get flash written on the 440GX, and then trying to figure out why DRAM did not work.
Sometime that spring SiS joined the effort. The first "multi-user login" message on the web page is "New as of 5/5/00: First login, 9:15 AM MST".
Also that Spring we moved the code base to FreeBIOS as it had more C and less assembly.
Ca. 5/10/00 the NPS tried to burn Los Alamos down so we took a short break.
From that point on, more and more people have joined the effort, and at
this point LLNL and linuxnetworx are building a 1000+ node linux cluster using linuxbios machines.
- What are the main benefits in using LinuxBIOS?
maintainable clusters maintainable systems fast boot (matters to some people) better control of the system LinuxBIOS in many cases does a better job of chipset config
Not as flexible as a normal BIOS.
well, not really true in all cases. Check out the cwlinux offering, where flash boots into busybox linux. NO BIOS is that flexible!
Requires hardware and chipset documentation, it's hard to keep up with the hardware development..
true for now, although at least two motherboard vendors are plannning to support linuxbios.
Hard to handle PCI cards with expansion ROMs on them that expect a standard PC BIOS.
partially true, but getting better.
- What chipsets are supported by LinuxBIOS today?
Is there a list of supported chipsets?
ls src/*bridge*/*/*
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