LinuxBIOS ready to go mainstream

After seven years of work, the LinuxBIOS project is on the brink of making a free BIOS a standard option for computers. Serious obstacles remain, including a lack of resources and resistance from some proprietary chipset manufacturers and OEMs, but the advantages of LinuxBIOS indicate that its availability to the average computer buyer may be only months away.

LinuxBIOS is intended to provide a philosophically free replacement for proprietary firmware in chipsets. It consists of the minimal amount of code needed to start a mainboard to the point at which a payload — an executable capable of starting a kernel, such as Etherboot — can finish booting the machine. As the name implies, work to date has focused on using a Linux kernel, but the same technology could be used to start a machine with Windows or the GRUB boot manager.

The project was started in 1999 by Ron Minnich of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Originally intended for embedded systems and clusters, the project quickly expanded to include work on servers and workstations as well. Despite some periods of relative inactivity, the project has “grown by a factor of 10″ each year, according to Minnich. The project received a boost in 2005 when it was added to the Free Software Foundation’s high priority list, and more recently when the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project chose to use LinuxBIOS in its efforts to produce an inexpensive computer to assist developing nations.

Read more at Linux.com