We're happy to announce that we've successfully booted Windows 2000 without a legacy proprietary BIOS. We accomplished this by developing software that combined elements from two very successful projects: LinuxBIOS and BOCHS. The Etherboot project also helped in various ways.
As a result, we now have a completely free software replacement for the BIOS that supports (without modification) either LILO or GRUB as bootloaders, and Linux, OpenBSD, and Windows 2000 as operating systems (NOTE: We're still working on supporting FreeBSD and Windows XP. We expect that improving ATA support will permit Win98 and WinXP to boot, and finishing PIRQ support will permit FreeBSD to boot.)
Motherboard support is limited at this time, but we hope to expand that along with LinuxBIOS.
More details can be found at:
http://www.missl.cs.umd.edu/Projects/sebos/main.shtml
and
http://www.missl.cs.umd.edu/Projects/sebos/phase2.shtml
The GPL'd source for our contribution, ADLO, will be included in the LinuxBIOS CVS tree shortly. ADLO is the "glue" that combines the initialization code from LinuxBIOS with the BOCHS BIOS code-- creating a true free software BIOS.
Ironically, twenty years ago this month Compaq introduced their Compaq portable computer with the first BIOS outside of IBM, see http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=547.
Adam Sulmicki Adam Agnew William Arbaugh
This work has been funded by a grant from DARPA under the CHATS program.
Whoo Hoo! Great News!
That just shaved $50K - $100K off of some projects here that would have needed the BIOS source from a few closed source vendors.
The embedded x86 world has needed this for some time. Truly great news!
Bari
Adam Sulmicki adam@cfar.umd.edu writes:
The GPL'd source for our contribution, ADLO, will be included in the LinuxBIOS CVS tree shortly. ADLO is the "glue" that combines the initialization code from LinuxBIOS with the BOCHS BIOS code-- creating a true free software BIOS.
What does ADLO stand for?
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Adam Sulmicki -
Bari Ari -
ebiederman＠lnxi.com