Onderwerp : [BLXF] LinuxBIOS

LinuxBIOS zogoed als klaar voor de massa

Het heeft zeven jaar werk gekost maar hij is er nu: de free en gpl 
Linuxbios :


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.

   Throughout the project's history, support from chip manufacturers and
   OEMs has been mixed. When the project started, Minnich remembers,
   information from Intel was readily available. Now, information about
   Intel chips is closely guarded, and the company prefers to promote its
   mixed source [*****]Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) as the next
   generation of chip technology. By contrast, Advanced Micro Devices
   (AMD) was slow to support LinuxBIOS, but is now a major contributor to
   the project. Among OEMs, supporters include Acer, Advancetech, SIS,
   Momentum Computer, and Newisys. The project also works closely with
   [******]OpenBIOS, a project with similar aims.

   Currently, Richard Smith, BIOS release manager for OLPC, says, "There
   are about 30 chipsets in the [repository] tree with various degrees of
   completion. The AMD boards are supported particularly well."

   Ward Vandewege, the system administrator at the Free Software
   Foundation, who has been gradually upgrading the organization's
   servers to LinuxBIOS over the last 14 months, describes the technology
   as adaptable by a hacker with only a moderate amount of knowledge
   about the BIOS, but still something that would pose a challenge for
   most members of the free software community to try.

   As of 2005, LinuxBIOS was installed on more than a million computers,
   mostly in Internet terminals produced by STPC Consumer in India.
   Because of OLPC and similar projects, Minnich estimates that this
   number could increase to more than a hundred million by the end of
   2008.

   Possible advantages

   In addition to its philosophical and political goals, LinuxBIOS
   represents a chance to rethink computer BIOSes. Active members of the
   project describe proprietary BIOSes as hopelessly mired in the
   thinking of 30 years ago. Unlike its proprietary equivalents,
   LinuxBIOS is written in C, rather than assembly language, making
   debugging and updating quicker and easier -- a crucial consideration
   in a market where new chipsets are released every six months and
   vendors have no time to make major modifications in anything except
   the most high-end boards.

   Smith also observes that at a time when the cost of licensing a BIOS
   from a chipset manufacturer "is becoming a larger portion of the price
   of the motherboard" and the size of proprietary BIOSes requires more
   Flash ROM, LinuxBIOS offers a free, smaller -- and therefore cheaper
   -- alternative. Given the decreasing profit margins on computer
   hardware, Smith expects that cost alone will make LinuxBIOS
   increasingly attractive to vendors.

   Similarly, because LinuxBIOS is licensed under the GNU General Public
   License, it can be a more attractive than proprietary BIOSes to
   security-conscious customers such as federal governments. For vendors,
   Vandewege suggests, the availability of the source code can also be a
   means of removing their dependency on chipset manufacturers to make
   all major changes in BIOSes.

   For ordinary users, Vandewege says, LinuxBIOS is also a guarantee
   against digital rights management technologies, such as the sandboxing
   feature of Intel's EFI, which controls software access to hardware.
   According to Vandewege, the introduction of such a feature raises
   issues of privacy and consumer rights, because "whoever controls the
   BIOS controls the computer. If you control the BIOS, you can lock out
   whatever loads after it."

   Yet possibly the greatest advantage is that LinuxBIOS is becoming a
   repository of BIOS knowledge. Because other BIOSes are proprietary,
   Minnich says, knowledge of them is often lost as chipsets change and
   experts leave the companies that produce them. As a result, the code
   in proprietary BIOSes can be maintained, but often not corrected. In
   their efforts to reverse engineer, LinuxBIOS members can not only
   build a debugged and more efficient BIOS -- one capable of booting to
   a console in as little as three seconds -- but also offer
   manufacturers and vendors a wealth of rediscovered knowledge about
   their own products.

   Challenges

   Despite these potential advantages, LinuxBIOS still faces significant
   challenges. "We've had a fairly rough time trying to get in with the
   main motherboard manufacturers," Smith says. "We haven't had the
   numbers and the clout to get our way in. And most of the manufacturers
   are so scared about releasing documentation, especially for the RAM
   controller, or, if they're doing a laptop, how to make all the special
   buttons work. And figuring out things by reverse engineering can be
   tricky -- you don't want to do something that they can come back at
   you legally for, and it's just time-consuming. It's hideous." In a
   field in which new models are release twice or three times a year,
   this resistance means that, in many ways, LinuxBIOS is continually
   lagging behind.

   The choice to develop for an alternative operating system is also a
   problem. When Microsoft makes a request, Smith says, "you have BIOS
   people falling all over themselves to make sure that it happens. But
   we don't get that level of support." Nor does Smith believe that
   LinuxBIOS will ever become a mainstream option until it works with
   Windows as well. This development is theoretically possible, but, so
   far, LinuxBIOS has not attracted any developers interested in working
   on it.

   In fact, as much as the resistance from vendors, the main problem for
   LinuxBIOS is one common to many free software projects: a lack of
   resources. Smith estimates that LinuxBIOS currently has five or six
   core developers and about the same number of people doing specific
   pieces of work at any given time. An especially encouraging sign, says
   Minnich, is that five or six computer science undergraduates have
   ported LinuxBIOS to specific chipsets over the last couple of years --
   a trend that he would like to see continue. Nor is progress helped by
   the current state of documentation, which Minnich describes as
   "terrible."

   Optimism for the future

   These challenges are not easily overcome, but LinuxBIOS members see
   signs of slow progress. "Manufacturers are getting better about
   releasing specs on older boards," Smith says, which may help LinuxBIOS
   extend its support and increase its credibility. And while Minnich
   admits that he sometimes gets discouraged about the slow rate of
   progress, he adds that recent developments give him strong reasons for
   optimism.

   For Minnich, one reason for optimism is OLPC's involvement. OLPC
   promises to be by far the largest deployment of the LinuxBIOS to date.
   Just as importantly, OLPC's decision not to use the [50]Advanced
   Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) specification for
   communication between the motherboard and hardware devices amounts to
   a much-needed updating of standard practices in the industry. If OLPC
   is successful, both in deployment and technology, as a part of it,
   LinuxBIOS should greatly increase its profile and reputation for
   innovation.

   Another reason for Minnich's optimism is Google's sponsorship of an
   [51]automated distributed testing environment for LinuxBIOS. This
   online facility will allow those interested to test safely and
   remotely, removing the need for project members to find hardware for
   themselves. Moreover, because new commits will result in new BIOS
   images for all boards, the facility will also help avoid forking of
   code for specific boards. In other words, the new testing environment
   promises to compensate for the project's lack of numbers and
   resources.

   Most significant of all, project members hope to see the first major
   vendors offering LinuxBIOS to customers soon. "If we really want to
   get installed on many machines," Vandewege says, "the BIOS is going to
   have to come with the machine." However, up until now, many vendors
   have been reluctant to offer LinuxBIOS as an option.

   Now, however, there are signs that the situation is changing. Project
   members are reluctant to say too much on the record for fear of
   disturbing various negotiations that are underway, although Stefan
   Reinauer of coresystems GmbH does indicate that progress is being made
   on such issues as assuring that users of LinuxBIOS are covered by
   warranties and that LinuxBIOS boards can include onboard graphics
   chips. However, AMD is expected to offer LinuxBIOS as an alternative
   to vendors in its next generation of high-end boards, and Minnich is
   willing to say that, with the help of the Free Software Foundation, he
   hopes that at least one vendor will support LinuxBIOS in workstation
   machines within the next year, and possibly on a laptop, he hints.

   Not all these expectations may come to pass, but, as Vandewege
   observes, "There's a serious amount of momentum going on right now."
   For the first time, project members can see a time coming when
   LinuxBIOS is no longer just an option for hackers with specialized
   skills but is readily available and, as Smith says, "will just be
   another platform. You'll just have to ask for it."

   Yet, for all the optimism in the project, some participants see even
   LinuxBIOS' ready availability as only a first step. "Getting to a free
   BIOS is a major step toward getting a totally free machine," Vandewege
   says, "but that's not the end of it, because, if you look at machines
   more closely, nowadays you'll find that there is embedded firmware in
   many parts. For instance, network cards often have embedded firmware,
   SCSI controllers do, even hard drives do these days."

   However, such considerations are for the future. So far as Vandewege
   knows, no one is working to develop alternatives to these other
   examples of proprietary firmware. For now, LinuxBIOS seems ready to
   emerge as not only a player in its field, but an innovative one -- and
   the sense of excitement around the project is almost tangible.

   Bruce Byfield is a computer journalist who writes regularly for
   NewsForge, Linux.com, and IT Manager's Journal.

Refs:

  *: http://linuxbios.org/index.php/Main_Page
  **: http://www.etherboot.org/wiki/index.php
  ***: http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/free-bios.html
  ****: http://laptop.org/
  *****: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Firmware_Interface
  ******: http://www.openbios.info/Welcome_to_OpenBIOS