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Kfir Lavi wrote: |
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> > I have an intel board, and the bios boots after 22sec. |
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> > Is it possible to boot the linux without a bios. |
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|
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coreboot is your only alternative to a BIOS. I'm active in the |
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project since some years. Instead of coreboot you could of course |
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also consider buying licenses for a custom BIOS from AMI but that |
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is often prohibitively expensive. |
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|
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> I have spoke in irc #gentoo-embedded with landley and he explained |
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> some stuff about my question regarding coreboot, uboot on x86. |
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uboot is not widely used on x86 so far. There has been some talk |
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between coreboot and uboot because the two could complement each |
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other well, but not yet. |
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You're of course welcome to stop by #coreboot and talk to us, and/or |
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check out some of the talks. |
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http://www.coreboot.org/Screenshots#Videos |
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I'd recommend "Beyond The Final Frontier" from 25C3 as a start: |
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http://www.coreboot.org/Screenshots#Chaos_Communication_Congress_2008_.2825C3.29:_coreboot:_Beyond_The_Final_Frontier |
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|
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coreboot completes it's task in a few hundred milliseconds. Some more |
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complicated boards (lots of busses and CPUs) take longer, maybe a |
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second or even two. |
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|
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We have a list of supported mainboards: |
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http://www.coreboot.org/Supported_Motherboards |
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If your board is not listed it may be easy or it may be hard. When |
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talking to us about it please be sure to provide very specific |
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information about your hardware. "intel board" is e.g. useless, we |
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need details for CPU, chipset, superio and the boot flash. |
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|
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As a general rule, NVIDIA and Intel are the worst possible targets |
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for coreboot, because they will not release documentation. |
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NVIDIA is simply impossible. Intel can be done, but you need a strong |
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business case with promise of many many units, and you need to sign |
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two NDAs in order to access the required, but insufficient, |
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documentation. The docs have some information but not all. It's |
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generally neccessary to reverse engineer parts of the factory BIOS in |
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order to actually get a board fully working. |
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On the opposite end of the spectrum is AMD, who have engineers |
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actively contributing code to coreboot. AMD recently let us know that |
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they will be adding AGESA support to coreboot, as well as releasing |
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AGESA under open source license, which means that coreboot will be |
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able to initialize many if not all AMD platforms with the code |
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written by AMD themselves, which is also being used by commercial |
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BIOS vendors. (AGESA is a firmware plugin system for AMD systems.) |
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This is of course really great news! :) |
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|
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There was mention of BOCHS BIOS in the chat log. coreboot does not |
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want to be a BIOS, because BIOS is a 30 year old concept. There is |
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clean separation between coreboot and what we call a payload. |
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coreboot does hardware init, the payload starts the operating system. |
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I rant about ACPI a bit in the talks. |
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|
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Payloads can be bootloaders or even a kernel. But for maximum |
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performance you will want to use SeaBIOS, an open source BIOS |
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implementation, as payload - because it supports ATA DMA, and boot |
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flash is much slower than that. (See http://stuge.se/pc2010.png - the |
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flash chip is *far* away from the CPU, on a slow bus.) |
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|
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SeaBIOS was originally forked from BOCHS BIOS, but is very much a |
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project of it's own by now, is continually being updated, and is also |
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the default BIOS shipped with QEMU since some versions back. |
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Hope this helps clarify a bit. |
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//Peter |