What is Digg?68 Comments
- Prod_Deity, on 10/12/2007, -7/+46From TFA:
"Seebach notes that reflashing a board's BIOS carries risk, because if the new BIOS fails to bring the board up, there will be no way to further reflash the BIOS without expensive, specialized equipment."
Might boot faster.... but is it cost effective if it tanks your system? I think not.
I'll stick with how things are for now, until something comes out that won't give me an expensive, large paperweight. - gr4yscale, on 10/12/2007, -1/+33There are many ways to recover from a failed flash. One common way is to hot swap the bios, as in...boot to a good motherboard with the same bios, pop in the bad chip, and then flash a known good BIOS onto the mis-flashed chip.
- dickeytk, on 10/12/2007, -1/+31not to mention many new motherboards come with a dual bios for protection from things like these
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+27Lucky for me I have a dual bios board. Brick one bios, boot from the other and automagically restore it. Yes, they do exist, Gigabyte and others make alot of them.
- gorkish, on 10/12/2007, -0/+26Aside from the dual bios boards from Gigabyte and the like, you can also buy a device called the 'Bios Savior' which sockets into your existing bios slot and gives you a switch on the outside of the case to physically switch between BIOS chips. It's invaluable for working with LinuxBIOS (OpenBIOS) -- in fact I'd go so far to say it's pretty much a requirement.
- smiley2billion, on 10/12/2007, -2/+27I guess that means you've gotta have the balls to attempt it. By the way, here's a list of supported motherboards from LinuxBIOS:
http://www.linuxbios.org/index.php/Supported_Motherboards - MasterJediYoda, on 10/12/2007, -0/+23I believe the purpose of OpenBIOS initially was so super computer creators would know all the important code that was running on their machine. They were paranoid that the bios manufacturers could be running code they don't know about. Essentially they wanted to have control of their machines. And they have that. You'll notice on the supported bios list that all those boards are server motherboards, most of them Opteron also.
As for purposes of linux bios in the future, it is very clear to me there are many purposes. For instance "trusted computing" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing ) which I like to call treacherous computing, can be used to control your machine(at a hardware level, you are already controlled by what Microsoft Windows limitations are). So for instance in the future, you may not be able to run illegal software("pirated"?) or may not be able to download copyrighted songs that you don't have rights to, movies etc. This technology is already sold on almost every Vista ready machine. The technology is out there to control you, imho it's only a matter of time before they start using it.(why else would it exist if not to use it?)
And as for myself as a GNU/Linux user, I like knowing all the code running on my systemm, especially in a day and age where privacy is nearly dead. When you do a windows update windows checks what software you have installed on your machine. When you use Real Player or Windows Media Player they monitor what you're watching.(etc etc the list goes on)
So I am a big supportor of Linux Bios, and I bought a Tyan motherboard and I'm running Linux Bios. - armbar, on 10/12/2007, -1/+24*sidenote to JimV: You're going to keep getting dugg down for posting that link to help baby hannah in your comments, worthy though the cause is.
- Solol, on 10/12/2007, -1/+15Yeah, right, because we all know how important it is for a server to boot very fast.
- doodlebumm, on 10/12/2007, -2/+14Linux can also be sped up if the hardware configuration is saved so that the next reboot doesn't have to probe for every possible new device, or the kernel is configured to just look at the hardware that is on the system. Both take more effort, but can be very effective.
- berwiki, on 10/12/2007, -13/+25@gr4yscale
do you have multiple copies of your home desktop motherboard laying around?
@dickeytk
I have never heard of this, but not doubting it exists...but what if linuxbios needs to flash over the part that allows you to select between bios'...same paperweight situation. - jcidiotashram, on 10/12/2007, -2/+13if i'm going to reboot once in a month or a year, i don't think i mind spending two more minutes in booting time.
- evilTak, on 10/12/2007, -3/+14"Also, consider that Microsoft doesn't really own the BIOS also, how is it that I can boot into Windows in under 20 seconds? The fact that Linux is slow to boot is suggestive of its OS design rather then a problem with the hardware."
The reason that windows "boots" in under 20 seconds is because it puts up the login screen before it does anything else. If you actually log in right away, it's a few minutes before you can actually do anything (such as use a network connection) because it's still doing all the same stuff in the background. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+14What piss me off the most is not slow booting time, but it's a proprietary BIOS full of bugs. Then getting stonewalled when trying to report the bugs to the manufacturer. Bring us the open source BIOS to the common computers, ASAP!!!
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11yes thank god there are people out there not afraid to do stupid crap like brick their computer or psp.. especially so i dont have to.
- MatB, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9It's the need of freedom from a proprietary piece of software, not the features list or the coolness factor that's pushing the developers of this project.
This is a proto project, i wouldn't even say it's intended for consumers, but for mobos manufacturer. - Topher06, on 10/12/2007, -8/+16Ah geeze, yes, the solution is to open it up.
From what I know about BIOS'es, there is nothing terribly complicated about them in the first place. An Open BIOS might make it easier for Linux to boot faster, but honestly, making Linux WORK faster with existing BIOS'es shouldn't be that complicated.
I agree that the BIOS is an antiquated POS that should be replaced with EFI or some other NEW standard, but there is no real need to have to append OPEN to it to make it seem better.
Also, consider that Microsoft doesn't really own the BIOS also, how is it that I can boot into Windows in under 20 seconds? The fact that Linux is slow to boot is suggestive of its OS design rather then a problem with the hardware.
Honestly, what I am hoping for is the idea of putting an OS on a chip. Having a chunck of non-volitile flash memory on the hard drive or motherboard that can have installed a small OS footprint (Linux would be ideal in this case) in order to have instant on booting of the OS would be more idea then hacking the BIOS for faster OS booting. Turning on a computer should be like turning on a Calculator, or even PDA, the OS is just there when you need it.
The fact that that the Linux camp is looking to hack an Open BIOS Standard based on legacy technology instead of looking for new solutions to the problem doesn't sit well with me. Linux should be striving for state-of-the-art, not run-of-the-mill solutions. - EdLesMann, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9BTW. For those saying windows boots up really quickly, it really does load stuff after the login so you can not count that as a full boot. And if you wanted to compare apples to apples, you can do the exact same stuff under Linux and actually have a faster boot time (or maybe the same boottime or maybe longer boottime). Dont believe me? Look it up. Do some damn research before you start spouting off crap you heard in another digg post.
Windows loads the kernel, drivers, security, and then the login manager (thats the uninformative blue scroll bar screen). Then you get to log in. After login is when it mounts drives, sets up the network connection, scans for new devices, loads services, loads user profile, and all of your programs (not necissarily in that order as it tries to run them in "parallel" ). Basicly it begins bringing up all the stuff you probably wont use for several minutes while it loads.
Thats a crap load of stuff after login. So just because you are at the login screen, does not mean it has booted.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_Startup_Process
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/sc.mspx?mfr=true
http://tinyurl.com/q3sml (in case the above doesnt work)
Now for Linux. What better way to illustrate things then with a demo.
p4 1.7 with 256mb ram to a complete working desktop.
Knoppix 4.0.2 boot time 2min 07 seconds
http://www.knoppix.org/
Accelerated Knoppix boot time 46 seconds
http://www.alpha.co.jp/ac-knoppix/index_en.html
Now imagine if I had pulled the stuff that I dont need and customized that boot a bit more(eg. no scsi in this box, why scan for it?). I could drop that A LOT further.
Lets face it, the defaults on both are "bad times" depending on the circumstances, and both can be improved. You can not base an argument completly on your experiances because your experiances ARE NOT the norm. If I were to go around saying that all Linux computers boot as fast as my Laptop or accelerated Knoppix then I would be wrong. If I said all windows computers boot slow, I would be wrong. My grandma's new compaq computer took 15 minutes to boot before I stripped out office preloading, quicktime, and half dozen other programs. Chances are that her computer is closer to the norm simply because EVERY vendor loads crap onto the systems and the average person doesnt remove them!
# Tired of people slamming Linux/Windows/Apple within uninformed posts just to watch their epenis grow. - spengy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8I think this is mainly meant for people developing standalone linux appliances and the like, but it could be cool on a desktop machine too, if you want to risk it.
- rolosworld, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9my brother had a laptop he tried to upgrade its bios and it got f*cked, the laptop was DEAD... until he bought another bios chip and replaced it, the laptop now works nicely. So there is no need of a new motherboard, you need to find out what bios you need buy one online and replace it.
- DrDabbles, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7That depends. What does your system do? A faster starting HTPC would not be a bad thing. An instant-on TiVO or HD-DVD player would be good. So, if your device requires that 10 second gain, then yes...it's very much worth it.
- vixenk, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Actually to hot flash a bios you only need another motherboard with the same size chip - not the same exact bios. As long as they're swappable *i.e. fit in eachother's sockets*, you can hot flash them.
You can also usually buy another chip from your motherboard manufacturer for about $10-$15.
These can also only be done if both motherboards have removable cmos chips, of course *i.e. not soldered to the board*. - UNL1M1T3D, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7That is why I love Gigabyte motherboards, most of them come with dual bios, so I could try this and if something gets messed up I am not out $100.
- greyfade, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6indeed. my new MSI motherboard came chock full of bugs in its ACPI implementation. (and a few models have a bad capacitor on them.) thankfully, MSI has been quick to release updated BIOS, but the currently-released version still has issues.
don't think that a BIOS is bug-free just because you rarely have to flash it. "bug-free" just means you haven't found the plethora of zoological nightmares pouring out of your BIOS _YET_. - EdLesMann, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6My intel board was supposed to be able to hold 4 gig of ram. I needed 4 gig for a project so I bought 4 gig. Turns out, they didnt think anyone would use all 4 gig, so why bother working out the bugs that allow it to only see 3gig? Eventually they fixed it (almost 2 years after it hit market) but they still had problems with it. So I only get 3.8gig total and they dont care because the board has now been "replaced" with a new product.
I would call that a bug in the bios...and a little bit of lies... - drakethegreat, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Those look mostly like server boards so I guess thats the market it appeals to. Somehow that is not surpising.
- Langford, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6A facinating idea. Replacing the BIOS kinda makes me nervious, but it's still a very interesting idea. Maybe I'll see if i can try it on an old system.
I wonder it it supports the old Abit BP6. It'a a good board that boots slow as hell. - OrangeTide, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6If you have 100 systems, then it might make sense to try OpenBIOS on one, if it works start loading them all up with it. What would be nice is if more vendors offered to ship motherboards with OpenBIOS instead (and they could save paying the royalities on the propritary BIOS). Only a few will do this, and only if you special order the motherboards in bulk.
- mtalon, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8First line of the article: "Linux device designers looking for faster boot/reset times should consider alternative BIOSes, suggests Peter Seebach in a technical introduction to open BIOSes published on IBM's DeveloperWorks website"
This isn't a tweak for Joe Geek. Like spengy said above, it's more for the engineers and such. Nowhere in here does it say this is a good idea for a home or office PC. I'd almost scream that the headline was inaccurate, but it's technically correct. Still, this is only mildly interesting. No digg, but maybe other people might feel differently. - EdLesMann, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6@doodlebumm
I agree. I stripped out all of the modules and things I dont need and used tools like prelink on my Laptop. Linux now boots in about 25 seconds.
@Topher
I always dread rebooting my server. I hold off as long as I possibly can before I reboot. While I often have half a year uptimes, it isnt because I am trying to prove something or be an elitist snob. I dread rebooting because it take 5+ minutes to boot the bios. I kid you not, it takes that long for it to run its memory check, scan for ide devices, then scan for the scsi sttached devices, and then finally bring up grub. It is a pain to work with that systems bios. Its an old p3 700 with 512mb ram, so it makes a perfect server with little reason to upgrade. Trust me, I have tried trimming that time down. Dell no longer puts out bios updates for that model, so I would love to have a bios that will give me more control over that board. Just because you dont see a need for it, doesnt mean that there isnt a need. - Matt2k, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5I thought Linux workstations never needed rebooting anyway.
Seriously though. Is it worth the risk of tanking your system for a 10 second increase in _boot up_ time - benplaut, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4The difference being that this one has a much higher chance of failing. It's worth a bit of healthy hesitation even using an official BIOS image from the mobo manufacture!
- dickeytk, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5i agree that it is kind of useless to us average geeks, but I dugg it because I thought the idea was interesting, it's something I've never heard of doing before
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5"the time wasted by proprietary BIOS legacy support for MS-DOS and other unnecessary functions."
Unless of course you use MS-DOS. - badogg, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7Topher06 said:
"Honestly, what I am hoping for is the idea of putting an OS on a chip. Having a chunck of non-volitile flash memory on the hard drive or motherboard that can have installed a small OS footprint (Linux would be ideal in this case) in order to have instant on booting of the OS would be more idea then hacking the BIOS for faster OS booting. Turning on a computer should be like turning on a Calculator, or even PDA, the OS is just there when you need it.
The fact that that the Linux camp is looking to hack an Open BIOS Standard based on legacy technology instead of looking for new solutions to the problem doesn't sit well with me. Linux should be striving for state-of-the-art, not run-of-the-mill solutions."
So, you are saying that the Linux community now needs to come up with their own set of Hardware instead of trying to make use of the hardware people already have?? People already have that kind of alternative if they so choose. Its called Apple, and no thank you. I like what they have done with OSX, but I am a cheap ass. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3this looks like fun, but pretty risky as i've had a few failed flashes on past motherboards I am a bit weary about trying it. I am glad to see that the bios is being targetted by the opensource community, this could bring some pretty cool advancements and faster boot times.
- kaczus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3It's not THAT risky. Just make sure you have a stable power source (UPS is recommended) Also, there are many boards that have backup bios, like DualBIOS for example, that runs if the other one fails. On a bit older computers many people had to upgrade his bios just for their new 160gig hard drives to work...
- zoxed, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I am not involved, but I have been tracking the LinuxBIOS project: suffice to say that the website is somewhat out of date: it is better to search and/or ask on the email lists.
Yes: it is mainly server boards, but also VIA boards (eg for HTPC projects). - bu11et, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3The list of supported motherboards is quite short:
http://www.linuxbios.org/index.php/Supported_Motherboards
Most of them are MBs for Opteron CPUs. Also, none of the brands are typical Desktop PC brands. Nothing here seems applicable to home users -- even those willing to try an open source BIOS. - DrDabbles, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3The point of LinuxBIOS is not for faster booting. The point of the project was to replace system BIOS in clustered environments so you could easily configure every machine the same with a single config file. Fast booting was simply a a side effect of the process.
What is more, the list has been stagnant since I last used the BIOS over a year ago. I was building firewall systems based on VIA EPIA chipsets and wanted to configure all the BIOS the same and easy to customize at the same time. There is another way to do this now, though. Many flash utilities allow you to flash only the config area of the system BIOS. So, I took an image of a config I wanted and flashed the next rev of systems with it. Worked like a champ.
I think EFI is going to be a much better solution than BIOS. Your typical PC BIOS initializes devices and whatnot, but with 8-bit instruction sets. On top of the legacy issues and expandability problems, a systems BIOS is typically VERY slow. With EFI you can expand the boot functionality as far as you want, and you get to drop any legacy cruft that has been picked up between the 286 and the Pentium 4. - drag, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2""Yeah, right, because we all know how important it is for a server to boot very fast.""
Depends on what you mean by 'server'.
To you a 'server' may mean a SMP HP box sitting in a corner with 2 gigs of RAM and RAID 5 array with hot swappable drives, but to other people it means a cluster of 20 or 30 Linux nodes with 2 cpus, 2 gigs of ram, a disk for swap that boot up over a network or fiberchannel.
With the cheap commodity hardware that people use nowadays your always going to have this or that node go down. Power supply needs replacing, a fan fails, ECC memory errors start cropping up etc etc. In a large enough cluster your always going to have this or that small portion of it winking in and out of existance. Of course with Linux clusters they can handle this no sweat, but it doesn't mean you want to have a node waiting on bios song and dance when it could be doing more important things.
Especially when you start getting into big-boy Linux territory with machines with not dozens, or hundreds, but thousands of nodes.
So with OpenBIOS you cut out the legacy BIOS crap and make your machines that much more flexible and easier to manage. OpenBIOS would allow people to do things that are not nesssicarially easy to do with regular bios system. Clustering is why you see all these 'server' motherboards supporting replacing the bios. - palmdoc, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Er right now on my Acer Aspire 5562wxmi, which dual boots Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux, Windows XP actually boots up faster.
- UNL1M1T3D, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Actually there was a bug or problem with my parents computer bios. It is an HP Pavilion a384x, and for some reason it kept freezing up and rebooting. At first I thought it was just some weird Windows anomaly, but after a reinstall that ruled that out. Then I thought it might be over heating or a bad motherboard. So I threw some extra fans in and still no solution to the problem. After searching on the Internet for about 2 hours I found one message board forum that talked about people having the exact same problem that I was having, and it started right after they upgraded the bios from version rev 3.07 to 3.12. I had completely forgot that I had upgraded the bios on there computer. Luckily someone had a copy of 3.07 so I loaded it up on a floppy with some bios flashing program (can't remember exactly what it was called) and reinstalled 3.07. From what I was told HP knows about the problem, but refuses to acknowledge it, or do anything about it. At one time they actually took rev 3.12 off of their website, but for some reason they put it back up.
- jacks0n, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1the open firmware homepage: http://www.openfirmware.org/
the linuxbios homepage: http://www.linuxbios.org/index.php/Welcome_to_LinuxBIOS - evilTak, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Actually I have a Tyan Tiger K8S in my home machine. Although I'm not going to flash my bios because:
a) I hardly ever (re)boot.
b) I don't require any of the features of an open bios.
c) There's no reason to take even a slight risk of screwing up my bios to fix a problem that I didn't know about until I read this article. - QuimZ, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Fun project with a little risque' appeal, if you're bored.
I just don't really give a crap how fast my linux boots. I don't reboot more than 3 times a week. Even if I booted daily, I probably wouldn't care.
Honestly, with the supported motherboards in the list, I'm suprised so many people have dugg this..How many end users up in here have one of these motherboards? - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Why does this story keep showing up on this site?
It still doesn't work on any motherboard I can buy at Fry's.
What I'd like to see is a post that says "LinuxBIOS developers significantly increase number of supported motherboards" or "LinuxBIOS developer team calls for help with development."
Posting an article that misleads people into believing they might get an open source BIOS for their motherboard is not helping.
Come on guys, you started working on this project in February 2000, six years ago and it still won't work on a Intel PERL board... - rektide, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1can you do execute in place?... that would be useful.
- savantelite, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I am worried about frying my laptop, but if I could start my computer in under 30 seconds, the long term time saved is worth it!!!
- OrangeTide, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1EFI is a nightmare like ACPI. YUCK!
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