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44 Comments
- Snoopsor, on 10/12/2007, -1/+32It looks like only good will come from a project like this. One of the main reasons why I leave my computers on all the time, is when I want access to them I don't have to wait a minute or more before they're usable. This also opens up different streams..How about a NAS machine with embedded samba and nfs on the rom?
Small devices could greatly benefit from such systems as well - note taking devices using eink etc. After seeing this, I will be paying far more attention to this project.
youtube video - http://youtube.com/watch?v=nuzRsXKm_NQ
9.7MiB ogg theroa video (better quality) - http://downloads.sourceforge.net/fornix/linuxbios.ogg - geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -3/+20The whole "hard drive not necessary, removing it".. yeah, the ROM image was already incredibly pressed for space, no room for an ATA controller and its supporting modules.
Very interesting anywho, definitely shows off the state of LinuxBIOS and what will be possible when we get motherboards with technologies like Intel's Robson; imagine storing everything you need to boot in the Flash, including the Kernel (and all of its drivers), and Xorg, booting in 20 seconds to a completely usable system with complete hardware acceleration. Bringing X86 machines back around to embedded designs. Exciting times. - raid517, on 10/12/2007, -1/+18You have no ***** clue what you're talking about.
- geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+15What is there to translate? LinuxBIOS, an open source BIOS layer developed for more direct control over your own hardware and its booting processes, was compiled onto a 2MB Flash NVRAM module along side an ultrathin Linux kernel, BusyBox (a single binary executable that contains most of the typical UNIX-style commands, often used in computers where space is tight), a tiny X11 server (KDrive, again, used on computers where space and memory is low, such as PDAs. Usually doesn't offer any kind of hardware acceleration at all), and an ultra tiny Window Manager (which allows you to run multiple applications in a GUI setting, as X doesn't have an integrated Window Manager like Windows or Mac OS X). RXVT is only there because it's a very lightweight virtual terminal (and I'm guessing it's the author's favorite, as there are plenty that would fit the bill).
Likely, the image is compressed and decompressed transparently on boot (which can be really fast depending on the algorithm), but still, to fit an entire operating system image, including graphical interface, on a 2MB system image is pretty amazing all in itself. - geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12"I dont understand why you would want Linux on your BIOS, the BIOS is fine as it is besides what if there is bugs not as if you can update it every couple of days or you will just break the ROM.
I do think a fast boot into Linux then loading extra modules to add more functionality is a really good idea but as geminitojanus said its already pressed for space."
You do realize that this *completely* replaces the vendor BIOS; some vendors ship stripped down, incompetent BIOSes with their boards, and this can be used as a complete drop in replacement for them. All this layer does is turns on the chipset, loads some registers, finds the video card and turns on a relatively simple framebuffer, finds the IDE channel and turns on a very simple IDE driver (very similar to that used inside of LILO, though GRUB2 is making advances), and boots the kernel from the first sector on the hard disk.
In this specific case, what's happening is the LinuxBIOS is booting a kernel that is contained on the same Flash chip as the BIOS image itself; this means it can immediately load Linux into memory (on the order of milliseconds), and dump you into a terminal within 6 seconds (or even quicker if there was a way to initialize the video card any faster, VGA LinuxBIOS anyone?). Of course, this is a _massive_ hack and very limited in its true usefulness, but it shows you what you can do with a 2MB Flash RAM and a lot of ingenuity. When we move to Robson and even larger BIOS Flash ROMs (4MB-8MB ideally), we can look into moving some of the low level OS configuration stuff into the board itself (imagine never having to install drivers again.. unless you want to ;), and leave the OS to the applications. LinuxOnBoard would boot virtually instantly and shutdown nearly as fast, and with a large enough Flash chip (which is why I'm hoping motherboard manufacturer's won't use those damned TSOPs and will mount a SD card slot on for a change in pace), you could suspend-to-Flash as well, meaning perfect restores to exactly where you left off.
We're on the threshold of these new technologies, still being held back by technologies like the traditional BIOS and the disregard for standardization amongst the major players (the level we're at now is incredibly good, but until I can buy anyone's chipset, pair it with anyone's microprocessor, and use anyone's graphics adapter, and never worry about DRM turning off my computer via remote, or booting me from the Internet, I won't be happy, even if that means I'll never be happy). LinuxBIOS is the natural evolution of the platform, and further dilutes the boundaries between the different "Roles" in computing ("Desktop", "Laptop", "UMPC", etc). - smellinator, on 10/12/2007, -7/+19I know I have my "anti-technology old-guy" hat on, when I say this, but I never understood why booting takes *any* significant time. Not just Linux, but Windows. Seems like a feature crying for implementation! (I mean, my toaster is a LOT dumber than my computer, and doesn't take any time!)
Seems to me that when the system is up and running, it could prepare for the next boot. Assuming that you aren't making any configuration changes, the "post-boot" image of memory could be stored to disk, then upon re-boot, loaded from disk, and you'd be up and running. And if you ARE making changes, then maybe a longer boot could be required.
Want to be stunned? Calculate how many "worker-days" are literally wasted due to waiting to re-boot, worldwide every year.
Almost as much as is wasted on digg.... hmm.... - mattway, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11The OLPC project is in fact using LinuxBIOS.
- miclill, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10Can't see the irony. The whole reason why we use graphic servers is because we get better resolution for our terminals, isn't it?
- geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10"I know I have my "anti-technology old-guy" hat on, when I say this, but I never understood why booting takes *any* significant time. Not just Linux, but Windows. Seems like a feature crying for implementation! (I mean, my toaster is a LOT dumber than my computer, and doesn't take any time!)"
Your toaster doesn't have a computer chip in it (most likely). Even if it did, it's likely that chip is a tiny Microcontroller, and literally has all of its code in memory already. Not so of a computer.
"Seems to me that when the system is up and running, it could prepare for the next boot. Assuming that you aren't making any configuration changes, the "post-boot" image of memory could be stored to disk, then upon re-boot, loaded from disk, and you'd be up and running. And if you ARE making changes, then maybe a longer boot could be required.
And the exact feature you just detailed is called "Hibernation" or "Deep Sleep" or whatever your particular operating system calls it ([Suspend to Disk]). However, you realize that Suspend-To-Disk has significant flaws; if the hardware changes state, when you try to reload the image, it can throw the hardware into undefined states. Even if everything goes just fine, it still takes quite a bit of time, scrubbing from disk to RAM. Suspend-to-Flash is the next big thing around the horizon, but most manufacturers aren't willing to build in this expense for two reasons: one, non-volatile RAM is fusing fast with SDRAM-like speeds, in solutions like FRAM (Freescale's Ferromagnetic RAM) and PRAM (Intel's Phase change RAM), which would immediately obsolete RAM. Second, Flash in quantities to mirror system RAM is still fairly expensive, and would require a very customized solution (either built into the RAM modules themselves, or built into the motherboard), and most motherboard manufacturers are waiting to see where the silicon hits (Intel's Flash controller-in-chipset in the case of Robson, Microsoft's hard drive solution, or AMD's yet undefined solution that we know they have and/or will license from Intel).
Quite frankly, it's a supply/demand thing. Most people don't care that they waste a minute or two for their computer to boot into a usable state, even if it costs some productivity. They can use that time to get coffee, use the restroom, read their snailmail. However, once it hits, it'll take off rapidly, as people realize there is a world where computers are virtually instant-on/instant-off. - crexor, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9more like booting in 5 seconds, 20 second boot time is already more than feasible with linux.
- mobilehavoc, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6I love how it's an X server session but all you do is open a terminal session and use the command line. Such beautiful irony.
- crash128, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5@mattway - thanks, didn't know that.
Only saw an article in businessweek about it. GUI looks pretty cool (talk about putting the user back into ui). I wish them well. - Hungryhaney, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4@nmcsween
Have you even read the www.openbios.info site? I found this on their front-page within 10 seconds of looking at the page!
In most cases, the Open Firmware implementations provided on this site rely on an additional low-level firmware for hardware initialization, such as LinuxBIOS or U-Boot. - crash128, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3This reminds me of that $100 one laptop per student project (small, affordable, mobile devices that use linux). Boo-yah, long live unix/linux.
- RicktheBrick, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Can anyone remember the Commodore 64? It did not require a lot of time to turn on. I once had a Tandy IBM compatible computer that would boot from rom also. It also did not take long to boot but one could not upgrade the operating system on rom so one eventually had to boot from the hard drive. I am really not that interested in how long it takes to boot but I am interested in being able to boot after the hard drive fails. It would be nice to be able to boot with cd support so that one could run programs to repair the hard drive. It would also be nice to have a backup program where if the hard drive fails it would boot and restore from the dvd to a new hard drive and be back to the point where one was before the hard drive failed.
- geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5"I like the idea of a non operating specific open bios implementation such as www.openbios.info."
Well then you'll _love_ LinuxBIOS, as it is probably the most far along open BIOS implementation; it's only called LinuxBIOS for "marketing purposes" and relation to the uClinux project, it can boot Windows and *BSDs just fine.
"Linux bios just seems like a gimmick who wants their most critical part of there computer crashing?"
Your BIOS isn't more likely to "crash" than any other BIOS; LinuxBIOS code may be unstable now, but for certain platforms it's already rock steady. Secondly, after it's flashed on the chip, it's doubtful you'll even know its there. Unless you're a hardware hacker or a computer manufacturer, you're likely not going to be one of the ones to load this on your board, and thusly you shouldn't worry about it. The good news is, it's completely transparent; you /can/ go grab the code, compile it, burn it. But you're not required to.
"and no I don't think linux is bad in anyway its just that 100% of bios code is audited the linux kernel umm well barely is."
And if you have ever worked at, or know anyone who works at a BIOS company, you will laugh at that assumption. Why do you think these manufacturer's release updates to their BIOSes? That's right: bugs. They're everywhere, even in tiny Flash ROMs. And for some reason, they're so much nastier in little Flash ROMs, so it's likely they're caught much earlier in the development cycle. This is true no matter who's developing it (unless they're a 16 year old or something), especially the LinuxBIOS team, where you've got hundreds of eyes pouring over the code instead of a small team. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3awesome, now give us this with gparted and incremental backup software. and very soon every pc will have linux pre-installed. :)
- cvncpu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2this plus a wget client to pull stuff for a web server into a ram drive, and ram /var, would allow it to become a very nice web server. A nice DB server that doubles as the content serving drive for all web servers, and you could have a nice simple HA site.
- Amablue, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3How long did it take them to set that up? ;-)
- ISVDamocles, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3@smellinator:
Not only what others have said above about loading drivers from memory, but several of those drivers have to go through boot sequences every time the hardware they control is powered on, because in order save a nickel by removing an EEPROM for each board they manufacture, all the memory on the hardware that needs to be initialized to certain values when started up isn't, so the driver must write to all those locations, then tell the board's local logic to come up, or possibly even restart, then wait until its ready, then perform any configuration needed based on what the operating system tells it.
This has to be done every time the computer is powered up, even from a hibernate mode (and why hibernation sometimes does weird things, because the operating system might not know just how stupidly designed such-n-such hardware is, and doesn't put it through its proper boot sequence). - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2This looks promising, I hope to see it on current hardware someday soon, I doubt the folks at AMI or Award are going to make things any easier.
- ferrofluid, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Ah retro time, very 1985 ish Amiga kernal, AmigaDOS and Workbench in a 512KB BIOS plus 1MB floppy.
The A500 and subsequent Amigas did this in less than 1MB, but this is good news for embedded Linux users.
Also if there is enough commonality bewtween PC BIOSes ie the soze of the NV RAM, its a good way to wind up Microsoft and show Linux booting up in a fraction of the time.
Puzzling thing why does a PC BIOS need to be 2MB in size, thats very large for whats there and alterable. I know some have room for snazzy loading pictures,
but 2MB is large. - naz37, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3@dioxide
thats one advantage linux systems have, if you are using a swap partition it saves all the hibernation data on the swap. To make this even faster you could easily us a flash SD card as your swap partition. - VinceNoir, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@smellinator
The speed for boot issues are:
1. Legacy BIOS is slow and today very unnecessary. Intel Macs don't use BIOS. Linux pretty much ignores BIOS. So... BIOS needs to go away.
2. The speed of hard drives is still slow. The new hybrid caching drives will produce improvements (paired with Vista, I hear you get to a desktop from "cold boot" in just a few seconds). The real answer is replacing hard drives with solid state storage. It's coming...
The LinuxBIOS project does what should have been done a decade ago. It ditches BIOS for the actual OS. The Linux kernel *IS* the BIOS for such a system, therefore you're able to get Busybox and whatever else up and running quickly. This is a perfect approach for Linux based thin clients. I'll have to look into it myself as I don't believe in PCs anymore. The future is a nebulous OS with no connection to the hardware. The OS should simply exist within a fabric of networked resources and shift processes between multiple and disparate CPUs, RAM and storage. I'm moving that way at home already with Xen and Network Block Device support (screw NFS or any other method of file sharing). - fulldecent, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I don't totally understand what the point of Linux BIOS is. I currently run an AMD Athlon system with an ASUS motherboard and ASUS comes with whatever BIOS it comes with, and I run Ubuntu.
I have the option of replacing this factory BIOS with LinuxBIOS.
Will my new system boot and work? Will I have to do anything else to make it work? Is there anything special to make my raid work? What are the benefits? - Xanium4332, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1boot faster, remove reliance on closed companies, help standardize the BIOS world, support the open source culture, learn something, and add more features (you never know what you get in a world not geared towards Windows)
You ask whether you'll need anything special to get RAID work, but you forget that Linux does raid all by itself. Bios (a.k.a. fake) RAID was invented to bring cheap RAID systems to the Microsoft masses!
But to answer your question on RAID, most probably not. As the BIOS technically contains a full linux kernel, it is capable of doing almost anything (including RAID).
Not having a jab at you, just think outside the box.... - steveoa3d, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Isn't a big sell point to LinuxBIOS that the mobo hardware companies don't have to pay the two big BIOS companies for the Bios Software. I read somewhere once that a significant cost of the mobo price is the fees of the BIOS. So if we can get more features at a lower price I'm all over it ! I would love to be able to virus scan, spyware scan, copy disk to disk, download, NAS and so on all from the BIOS.
Now we need a BIOS chip that uses micro flash cards for storage ! - InMSWeAntitrust, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@smellinator
The reason it takes so long is so that they can detect new hardware and use it, and also because if you used an older image every time, what happens if that image corrupts?
Among other things... - geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"If the design objective of the system was to "minimize the time between pressing the on button and being able to do productive work" then there'd be a better design and the boot time would be similar to my toaster's boot time. Instead, the design objective seems to be "be cautious and explore any possible configuration change"."
No, the boot time would still be fairly slow. When humans boot, they already have in memory everything that was there before. When computers boot, they've got to reinitialize _everything_, restoring states to where they were before they were shutdown (and hoping those states are defined). The design isn't "be cautious", it's "do this or don't boot". You can't just turn on a piece of hardware and say "whelp, time to go to work, here's some instructions", you absolutely _MUST_ set up at least the registers so the hardware has a state to receive said instructions and start processing. This takes time, especially as hardware complexity increases and you have more and more registers and states to check and restore.
The boot system also largely ignores configuration changes. For example: when booting Linux, the "hotplug" manager included in most more recent distributions will enumerate the system bus and see what hardware is there. For hardware that's known to be working and previously configured, it loads the generic profile built for that hardware (modprobe hardware-name usually does it). If it's not already enumerated, it journals this and sleeps on it. When it's got some (cpu) time later, it explores how to configure this hardware, and installs the corresponding modules accordingly. Can you skip this? Sure, if you want none of your hardware to work. You could also write scripts to automatically load the hardware you want manually, which is marginally faster, but is not flexible to adding/removing hardware [anyone using Debian pre-2000 knows this pain, manually writing out which modules to load on boot is a pain in the ass]. You can take this a step further and build a custom kernel that already has these drivers built in, instead of being modular. This gives you another marginal speedup (though bigger than editing your module config), but with the significant trade-off of now having to manage your own kernel (patches, upgrades, changes in hardware, etc).
So, you've managed to cut down your boot time from 1:30 to about 1:10 (maybe). Now you start cutting out user space daemons, as they're the biggest waster of time on boot. Things like DHCP config, gone. That means manually setting your own IP configurations. Avahi/mDNS autodiscovery are also out, which means configuring your own printers and other shared intranet services. SSHD is out so no remoting in to your computer. The list goes on and on. You're down to 40 seconds. You've still gotta load X (unless you want to do that by yourself too), which still requires setting up a very complex beast, which takes a long time. You really _can't_ bypass this, no matter how much you want to.
What's taking so long? You're hardware bound; your hard drive simply can't move any faster to get the data into RAM any faster. Even your ultrafast 15000 RPM (30-8 useconds seek time) hard disks can't keep up with even the most lowly, cheap Flash module (~30 nanoseconds random access, 3-4 orders of magnitude faster).
Oh, and lastly, you _can_ boot to minimal configuration, if you want. Just don't expect _any_ distribution to take you seriously; rebooting in Linux is a sufficiently rare enough event that more people prioritize fixing the start up times of programs once you're booted, as that's really the productivity killer (I can't tell you how many _hours_ I've wasted waiting for SMB volumes to come available, or for Nautilus to draw a window containing a few thousand documents (whitesheets), or waiting for web pages to finish rendering, especially those damned sites covered in Flash which can slow even the most modern browsers to a crawl). - smellinator, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@geminitojanus:
Like a lot of engineer-types, you are missing the forest for the trees. No disrespect intended.
You just gave a thousand reasons why it can't be done, and then in your last paragraph, said it could sort-of be done. You need to think outside the box.
I have absolutely no doubt that if a "system" (hardware+firmware+software) were designed FROM THE GROUND UP with the objective of "fast boot" being the norm, it would be done. Hibernate SHOWS that it can be done. You make a point that they have to re-initialize *everything*. Two questions: Why (really, why.... and don't give a technical answer as to why it is done this way now), and why can that not be instantaneous? Try not to fall into the trap of saying "because that's how it is now." ... I KNOW that's how it is now. You have said that in each of your posts. I KNOW that. I'm saying that it absolutely positively does NOT HAVE to be that way.
If every component (from hardware to firmware to system software to application software) were designed so that "power on" state WAS a working / productive state, then when the system received power, you'd be able to work. Period. It's that "simple". But since Processor vendors and Board vendors, and Disk Vendors, and PC vendors and OS designers are all in their own little silos, this won't happen anytime soon.
A minute boot-up time is ridiculous. I *have* systems that boot in a fraction of a second. There are models to learn from in the market already (whether you look at a calculator or an old microcomputer - heathkit 3400 or something). Just because you add complexity doesn't mean you need to add boot time - and engineers who think so just aren't very creative in their solutions! Cell phones and DVR's are other examples which have extremes - some are rapid boots, others are seconds or even a minute long.
Just take the DVR - there's no reason in the world a DVR can't be nearly instant boot. After all, VCR's could do it, years before. If you built a single-function DVR (meaning it wasn't really just dvr software on top of linux, like a lot of them are), you could have something like a VCR which boots instantly. But noooooooo - many DVR builders are building on top of other platforms (for other reasons, like time-to-market). And it's silly. If power goes out, I need to wait for 2 minutes for my DVR to reboot?? That's braindead!
So once the market settles down, and time-to-market isn't so important, DVR builders will address this, so that they can differentiate themselves from the competition. But for now, we have to live with the 2-minute boot process right in the middle of your favorite show, when the power goes out. - TopBanana, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1This looks pretty exciting for stuff like open source media centres and in-car navigation where you need quick start times
- Subassy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0@RicktheBrick:
You're actually describing the last version Ghost for DOS (6.2 or something like that). Once you create the first bootable CD/DVD you can then boot off it and tell it you want to create a new image from whole HDD or partition and save it to CD/DVD. It then makes your new blank disc bootable and burns the image for you. You could keep doing that in perpetuity. Which I've been doing since that version was released several years ago. Don't bother with the new ghost for Windows; it's not the same (No option to burn to CD while booted from a CD). Also it supports all popular file systems (including Ext2). I have used this several times to ghost a failing HDD (as reported by SMART) and restore the image to a new HDD. Works perfectly. - Lobster, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1A fast booting BIOS / OS combination used to be availlable and still is in mobile phones
With something like this
http://puppylinux.org/wikka/CommunityEdition
or other small Linux
we can allow developers to concentrate on software, not basic functions
Good work these guys - smellinator, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1@insomniac, dioxide, geminitojanus, InMSWeAntitrust, VinceNoir, ISVDamocles:
I know What the PC is doing during boot. And I know about flash memory and hibernation and corrupt images and the need to BE ABLE to do a full reboot.
I'm saying that it's a poor design. Having to initialize every card, etc, is brain-dead. Having to do all this BEFORE productive work can be done by the user is even brain-dead-ier.
If the design objective of the system was to "minimize the time between pressing the on button and being able to do productive work" then there'd be a better design and the boot time would be similar to my toaster's boot time. Instead, the design objective seems to be "be cautious and explore any possible configuration change".
The DEFAULT should be a quick boot. Like in Python programming, you "feature" the thing that's going to be done 99% of the time, and you make the exception be just that - an exception. (in common python design patterns, if, for example, you are reading from a large file, you do NOT check for EOF condition before the read. You read, and treat the EOF condition (which only happens in the "exception" case) as an exception. Try: / Read / Except: / handle EOF. As opposed to the "traditional": If EOF / bunch of crap that only needs to get executed once / else / read. )
The current boot process acts as if every boot is an exceptional case (like something might have changed, like the image might be corrupt, etc.) That's just ass-backwards. The "rule" case should be a fast boot. The exception case should be a slow boot.
Even copying a memory image from disk should be done in a prioritized fashion. Only read in the bare minimum so that I can start making toast! - Nmcsween, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0@raid517
Nice.. doucebag of the day award.
@geminitojanus
Sure theres bugs but there is auditing I mean come on the linux kernel has had *many* race conditions fixed in the past... hmm race conditon on a BIOS. Yes I do know LinuxBIOS can boot windows, etc I still dont think a non mission critical operating system should be on a critical piece of hardware - calvmari, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2I think, but I'm not sure, it means that you can boot up your computer *really* fast. As in, *BOOP* .... you're in! Also, they managed to fit an entire operating system on the motherboard without needing a hard drive. So that means if your hard drive gets borked (a la click of death), you can still use your computer without special bootup disks.
- redxii, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1I can still configure stuff like memory timings and fsb, right? Hopefully I can still do that and as easily as a traditional BIOS (no ***** with commands and manpages), and the settings will stick when powering down completely.
- sardiax, on 10/12/2007, -6/+2hawt
- dioxide, on 10/12/2007, -12/+6@insomniac
the flash you're talking about is something like an order of magnitude slower than modern hard drives. there have been recent attempts to make realistic solid state hard drives, working at the same or better speed as a hard disk, but they work in something like the raid 0 fashion, spanning the data across several blocks of flash, making the perceived speed to be (flash speed)/(number of blocks). if the drive has 100 blocks, it would be 100 times faster than the flash speed (as long as the best scenario criteria are met).
@smellinator
booting doesn't take much time at all. if your system was booting dos instead of windows or osx, you would be at a command prompt 10 or 15 seconds after you hit the power button, as long as you don't have some kind of mass storage device that scans the bus for 3 minutes or something.
what makes things like windows and linux slow to be ready is the loading of all the drivers, and pulling all the crap off the hard drive that has to be loaded into memory. using windows as an example, the best boot time will be if you use the hibernation method. that dumps memory to a file on your hard drive when you shut down, and reads the file back to memory when you start up.
the limiting factor there is the amount of ram you have, and how much of it needed to be dumped. reading it back could taker anywhere from a few seconds to a minute, depending on your hard drive and fragmentation.
i always thought that hibernation systems should have a partition dedicated to memory dumps. then you would never have fragmentation issues, and the possibility of you not having enough space left on the drive is nulled. - timdorr, on 10/12/2007, -15/+5Yeah, wake me up when this runs Beryl *yawn*
(kidding) - Jonny0stars, on 10/12/2007, -10/+0I dont understand why you would want Linux on your BIOS, the BIOS is fine as it is besides what if there is bugs not as if you can update it every couple of days or you will just break the ROM.
I do think a fast boot into Linux then loading extra modules to add more functionality is a really good idea but as geminitojanus said its already pressed for space. - FRAGaLOT, on 10/12/2007, -16/+3anyone understood what the hell all of that meant? Anyone translate in English?
- insomniac8400, on 10/12/2007, -28/+3Wouldn't using a flash hard drive accomplish the same speed?
- Nmcsween, on 10/12/2007, -26/+1I like the idea of a non operating specific open bios implementation such as www.openbios.info. Linux bios just seems like a gimmick who wants their most critical part of there computer crashing? and no I don't think linux is bad in anyway its just that 100% of bios code is audited the linux kernel umm well barely is.
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