[LinuxBIOS] LinuxBIOS vs. FreeBIOS vs. OpenBIOS?

[Uwe Hermann]

Hi,

I'm currently reading all available documentation to get into LinuxBIOS.
But I'm wondering how it's related with the other projects such as
OpenBIOS and FreeBIOS.

OpenBIOS is not a "competitor" in the strict sense, it's a layer above
LinuxBIOS as I understand it, and can be used as payload for LinuxBIOS,
right?

FreeBIOS seems pretty dead (last update 2003?). Was it an alternative
project which is now unmaintained, was it the same as LinuxBIOS (name
change), or have both projects merged?

TIA, Uwe.

[David Hendricks]

LinuxBIOSv1 and FreeBIOS shared the same source base. I think it's safe to
say that LinuxBIOSv2 is FreeBIOS's successor. OpenBIOS is a free
implementation of the Open Firmware specification and can be used as a
LinuxBIOS payload. It's not a competing project and in fact the project
maintainer, Stefan Reinauer, has long been and still is a maintainer of
LinuxBIOS.

On 7/13/06, Uwe Hermann <[e-mail] > wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm currently reading all available documentation to get into LinuxBIOS.
> But I'm wondering how it's related with the other projects such as
> OpenBIOS and FreeBIOS.
>
> OpenBIOS is not a "competitor" in the strict sense, it's a layer above
> LinuxBIOS as I understand it, and can be used as payload for LinuxBIOS,
> right?
>
> FreeBIOS seems pretty dead (last update 2003?). Was it an alternative
> project which is now unmaintained, was it the same as LinuxBIOS (name
> change), or have both projects merged?
> TIA, Uwe.
>
> Uwe Hermann
> http://www.hermann-uwe.dehttp://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.hermann-uwe.de
> http://www.it-services-uh.dehttp://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.it-services-uh.de  |
> http://www.crazy-hacks.org
> http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.crazy-hacks.org
> http://www.holsham-traders.dehttp://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.holsham-traders.de|
> http://www.unmaintained-free-software.orghttp://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.unmaintained-free-software.org
>
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[ron minnich]

One very slight corredion. The very first linuxbios, for about the first 6
months, was actually derived from openbios. Stefan wrote openbios
and it could actually boot from power on on certain platforms. We wanted to
move to a more C-based code base and Johan Rydberg offered
freebios up, after Jim Garzik pointed us at it.

So there have actually been three versions of linuxbios.
1. openbios-based (v?)
2. freebios-derived (v1)
3. fairly comprehensive rewite (v2)

There are still one or two bits of linuxbios v2 that trace back to v?, I
believe.

ron

[Uwe Hermann]

Hi,

On Thu, Jul 13, 2006 at 10:26:03AM -0700, ron minnich wrote:
> So there have actually been three versions of linuxbios.
> openbios-based (v?)
> freebios-derived (v1)
> fairly comprehensive rewite (v2)

Thanks a lot for the infos.

Cheers, Uwe.