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Linux Software

LinuxBIOS Boots Linux, OpenBSD, Windows 265

Posted by timothy from the with-source dept.
Ivan writes "LinuxBIOS coupled with BOCHS has replaced the PC BIOS. The union of these two cool open source projects completely replaces closed source BIOS, while retaining the ability to boot other operating systems like BSD and Windows. Here's the announcement."
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LinuxBIOS Boots Linux, OpenBSD, Windows More

LinuxBIOS Boots Linux, OpenBSD, Windows

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  • first post (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 25, 2002 @05:52AM (#4750056)
    Why not start using OpenFirmware on PCs???

    • Re:first post (Score:3, Informative)

      by obi ( 118631 )
      Oh you mean like this:

      http://www.freiburg.linux.de/OpenBIOS/

      They will be able to leverage some of the work (init code) of LinuxBIOS.

      It'll be a wonderful day when we'll finally be able to rid ourselves from those damned Award/AMI/Phoenix bug-riddled extremely legacy code. I even kept a couple of openfirmware images for the Voodoo3's and other hardware lying in this room, just in case openfirmware will get used in another machine than my mac.

      This rules.

      • It'll be a wonderful day when we'll finally be able to rid ourselves from those damned Award/AMI/Phoenix bug-riddled extremely legacy code.

        Yeah. But would you agree that Award is a tonne better than AMI and Phoenix?

        I love being able to insert ROM images as modules into my Award BIOS (Etherboot, LAN booting without EPROM).

      • It'll be a wonderful day when we'll finally be able to rid ourselves from those damned Award/AMI/Phoenix bug-riddled extremely legacy code.

        Actually, we better get lawyers. If somebody manages to set up a LinuxBIOS based machine that also has an X server and a certain Gecko based web browser [mozilla.org] and then starts selling it in a thin-client configuration, the maker of Phoenix BIOS might get more than a little peeved [slashdot.org].


        Hooked on Phoenix worked for me!

  • rushed announcement (Score:5, Informative)

    by Afrosheen ( 42464 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @05:53AM (#4750061)
    Don't get too excited, winxp, win98 and freebsd don't boot yet. Freebsd needs PIRQ support while XP and 98 are held back by the lack of adequate ATA support. In the future they expect to have it worked out.

    • How useful is this? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by 0x0d0a ( 568518 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @06:01AM (#4750087) Journal
      Okay, from a user's perspective. Even if they consider your board "supported", *and* there aren't any bugs, I have one big question.

      How "supported" is "supported"? Can I change all the parameters that I can now? Does the OS get back the right sizes of drives when it asks about them? Are there issues with setting stuff like the RTC? What is broken? How about temperature sensors and other stuff on the I2C bus?

      Because I'm willing to be that "we can boot BSD" is a long way from "this is a complete, end-user ready product that supports all the functionality of the hardware."

      • ANNOUNCE: LinuxBIOS booting Windows 2000 (Score:4, Informative)

        by DrSkwid ( 118965 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @06:17AM (#4750146) Journal
        ANNOUNCE: LinuxBIOS booting Windows 2000 (free software BIOS)

        which is a milestone in the LinuxBIOS project.

        It claims nothing else.

      • I like freedom, options, and flexibility, but what user-land problem does this BIOS replacement solve?

        I am not asking this with sarcasm, I just didn't see much about this on their web site.
        Thanks.

        • IMHO the primary application of this is in virtual and emulated PCs. If you have ever used VMWare, you'll notice that they actually use the Phoenix BIOS. There are two Free Software projects that provide "machine in machine" capability: Bochs and plex86. Both of these require a BIOS to function. There is a closed source BIOS (I forget whose) who has allowed bochs and plex86 to distribute a binary version only for use in those programs. Having to distribute a closed binary with a Free Software product is problematic. Thus, the project to produce a Free Software BIOS.

          Some low-end hardware OEMs might be interested in a Free BIOS as well, since this would allow them to sell their cheap hardware even cheaper.

          But you asked about userland. In userland, the main use will be for emulators and virtual PCs.

      • Re:How useful is this? (Score:5, Informative)

        by SurfsUp ( 11523 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @12:18PM (#4752171)
        How "supported" is "supported"? Can I change all the parameters that I can now? Does the OS get back the right sizes of drives when it asks about them? Are there issues with setting stuff like the RTC? What is broken? How about temperature sensors and other stuff on the I2C bus?

        The answer to this is clear when you know that Linux almost completely ignores the bios after it boots. The emphatically includes hard drive configuration. To prove this to yourself, go into your bios and set all your hard drives, CDRoms etc. *except* your boot disk to "none". Boot Linux. Hey, it works just the same as it did before, amazing. The reason for this is, Linux is perfectly capable of ignoring the configuration information returned by the bios, because too often that information is just plain wrong. So Linux has been forced to discover that information for itself by directly querying buses, controllers etc, and basically, knowing about every hardware device in the world. Impressive achievement, when you think about it.

        Linux now knows a lot of temperature sensors and the like, in spite of the reluctance of companies like Intel to release the technical specifications. I believe we're either at the point or close to it where Linux does a better job on the sensors than the bios does. Some other items are still sore points, such as processor speed configuration, which again has been kept as a deep dark secret by Intel and others. Another item in this category is power management, and then there is SMM - system management mode. All this is in various stages of reverse engineering. At some point, Intel will even get a clue and realize it's to their advantage to release these specs openly, instead of thinking they can exert some kind of control over the industry by keeping it secret. They can't, which has been proved time and again. All they can do is make things so that the code is not peer-reviewed, and therefore buggy and unreliable. (Don't tell me your power management isn't buggy, I won't believe you.) Another bad effect is that when your manufacturer goes under or EOLs the product you no longer get bios upgrades, too damm bad.

        Because I'm willing to be that "we can boot BSD" is a long way from "this is a complete, end-user ready product that supports all the functionality of the hardware."

        So? As soon as you get a new computer, the first thing you should do is make sure you can reflash the bios with the vendor's latest bios upgrade. If you don't do that, I can assure you that you will regret it a few years down the road, when you are forced to upgrade the bios for some reason, larger hard disks being a perennial example of such a reason. So, once you've done that, put aside a floppy disk with the bios upgrade image and a copy of FreeDos [freedos.org] on it, and you are safe (unless the vendor's bios flasher messes up on you, in which case you needed to return that PC anyway). Go ahead and flash in LinuxBios and try it out. Either it works or it doesn't. If it doesn't work, just reload the Vendor's bios (which you already verified works correctly, right?) If it does work, you will have a clean, cool boot and endless source of upgrades. No longer will you have to worry about your bios ever going obsolete or bios bugs going unfixed forever. Never mind the fact it boots faster.
        • Go ahead and flash in LinuxBios and try it out. Either it works or it doesn't. If it doesn't work, just reload the Vendor's bios

          One thing I can't figure out is how, if your flashed LinuxBIOS is broken, how you can even necessarily boot back to FreeDOS to flash your BIOS again back to the vendor's BIOS. I'm not one of those fortunates with a BIOS-in-ROM that I can revert to by just closing a jumper...

          No longer will you have to worry about your bios ever going obsolete

          I can just see Debian putting this in their tree and apt-get flashing the BIOS. ;-)

          • Re:Thank you -- informative (Score:5, Informative)

            by SurfsUp ( 11523 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @01:40PM (#4752725)
            "Go ahead and flash in LinuxBios and try it out. Either it works or it doesn't. If it doesn't work, just reload the Vendor's bios"

            One thing I can't figure out is how, if your flashed LinuxBIOS is broken, how you can even necessarily boot back to FreeDOS to flash your BIOS again back to the vendor's BIOS. I'm not one of those fortunates with a BIOS-in-ROM that I can revert to by just closing a jumper...

            Yes, important question.

            1) Make sure your bios is socketed, not soldered onto the motherboard when you buy your computer. If it isn't socketed, you don't want that computer because the manufacturer doesn't care about you. 2) Get this thingy [pcmods.com]. 3) Get a new flash chip and verify you can make/boot a backup bios 4) You can relax now.

            There are other ways to get around bios re-flash disasters, for example, you can use a running PC as a crude kind of flash writer by hot plugging a bios flash chip, being careful not to short anything. But the dual-socket approach abover is really the easy and safe way to go. I'd say, whether or not you indend to reflash your bios, it's well worth grabbing one of those dual flash sockets just in case you ever need it.
          • One thing I can't figure out is how, if your flashed LinuxBIOS is broken, how you can even necessarily boot back to FreeDOS to flash your BIOS again back to the vendor's BIOS. I'm not one of those fortunates with a BIOS-in-ROM that I can revert to by just closing a jumper...

            Basically, you can't. If you don't have a recovery jumper, then flashing with a linux BIOS that doesn't work on your system is a one-way ticket.

            In fact, even with the jumper you will most likely be hosed. In the two or three designs that I know about, all the jumper does is cause the OEM BIOS to restore the default settings. It doesn't change the actual BIOS code. So, if you replace the original BIOS with something totally different, I wouldn't expect the jumper to do anything at all.

            The bottom line is, don't reflash unless you have a reason and have confidence that the new BIOS will at least boot DOS or some operating system that will let you flash back to the last known good version.

            MM
            --

    • While it would be nice to be able to boot FreeBSD in case I ever want to try it, the inability to boot any version of Windows is a real plus.
    • Heh. Why not just post a link to the announcement? :)

  • What I want to know is.. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    will this ever get adopted by big vendors like Dell, HPQ, Gateway, etc.

    If not then no one will use it outside of the OSS community.

    • Re:What I want to know is.. (Score:5, Informative)

      by MikeFM ( 12491 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @06:15AM (#4750138) Homepage Journal
      This is very useful for the Open Hardware community. It's one important step closer to having every piece of a working PC's hardware and software opened. With the hardware open sourced as well as the software users have some choice in what they use.. important considering the push for DRM and similar hardware crap being forced on us.

  • One GIANT leap for Free Software! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Yahoo! We've finally solved this huge "BIOS" problem that has been lingering around since, um, 1980, and now made it Free as in Freedom!

    This is also especially innovative as there was no such thing as a BIOS coming standard on any motherboard till today.

  • Cool but.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by miketang16 ( 585602 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @05:55AM (#4750069) Journal
    I think I'll wait for a more mature release before I go replacing my Award BIOS. As much as I love open source stuff, I don't want to deal with my BIOS being screwed up at the moment.
    • What a counter-productive point of view.

      That's sort of like saying "I'll stick with Windows until Linux gets out of development stages."

    • Re:Cool but.... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Shanep ( 68243 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @08:10AM (#4750526) Homepage
      I think I'll wait for a more mature release before I go replacing my Award BIOS. As much as I love open source stuff, I don't want to deal with my BIOS being screwed up at the moment.

      Incase anyone ever does find themselves in a pickle with a failed BIOS flashrom...

      You can often use flashrom chips from other motherboards, sometimes even if they are a different type of flashrom.

      I had one machine BIOS upgrade go really bad (no longer even got to display any POST info at all, not even frantic beeping), I pulled the bad flashrom out, booted another motherboard with a DOS floppy with the old ROM image and flash program, while it was ON I pulled out the good flashrom and inserted the bad (two completely different models of motherboard), flashed the bad rom back to the old image, swapped the flashroms back and presto, both machines working.

      You have to be very careful not to short anything when extracting the flashroms while the PC is ON and whatever you do, don't insert them the wrong way around!

      The Award flashers will typically detect the part type and voltage, warn you that it's not the correct image for the current motherboard (if the mobos are sufficiently different) and then proceed to flash if you give it the OK.

      This should probably only be done as a desperate measure where you can afford to loose the motherboard that you temporarily flash with. Pick up some PC's off the street for spare flashroms and elligible flasher motherboards that you don't mind wrecking.

      My OpenBSD file server is a Pentium 200MMX that someone just threw out. Works beautifully. In fact every PC I've picked up off the street has worked without any problems.

    • Re:Cool but.... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Spoing ( 152917 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @09:17AM (#4750905) Homepage
      I think I'll wait for a more mature release before I go replacing my Award BIOS. As much as I love open source stuff, I don't want to deal with my BIOS being screwed up at the moment.

      You could use a BIOS switcher tool like the Bios Savior [bit-tech.net]. It sells for ~$20-30. With it, you can keep your known-working BIOS backed up, fool around with LinuxBIOS or other BIOS changes, and then if you can't boot or get locked out...switch back.

      Cost: From ~$20 to ~$30 USD -- depending on the seller.

      Disclaimer: I haven't used this...just passing it along. All BIOS upgrades I've done were for minor BIOS revisions or (if beta) after a few others had upgraded. Because of that, a BIOS backup tool like BIOS Savior is really overkill. For LinuxBIOS or other drastic changes, it sounds like an ideal tool.

  • Great!!!! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Annoyed Coward ( 620173 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @05:56AM (#4750070) Homepage Journal
    This will prove to be an important step. Replacing closed source system is going to happen piece by piece. And more important, the BIOS comes under close scrutiny of brilliant pool of open source community.
  • ... it's not as if you can buy motherboards that have no BIOS! :)

    Or is it just for apps like bochs that need an implementation of a BIOS on software?
  • If you install this, do you lose your old BIOS? For example, if I install it to my ASUS board, will it eliminate my ability to go to the BIOS setup menus? What happens to my ability to change the jumper settings through software?

    • Re:What happens to the old BIOS? (Score:5, Informative)

      by mnordstr ( 472213 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @06:08AM (#4750110) Journal
      Before upgrading your BIOS, you should always make a backup of the old one. You can find the BIOS upgrade utility from Asus' homepage. That utility can be used to read/write the BIOS. So if you upgrade and don't like the new one, you can downgrade to the one you had before if you saved it on a floppy. However, playing with the BIOS is a risky business. Be careful.
      • Yes but isn't the problem if you do screw the BIOS you can't boot your PC in order to reflash it?

        Usually the only alternative open is to boot another PC and remove the BIOS whilst the PC is running and insert the corrupted one then flash the old corrupted bios on this PC.

        This has always seemed a tad risky to me.
        • That's why I said "if you don't like the new one" and "playing with the BIOS is a risky business". If you totally fck it up, then you might have a slight problem =)
          That's why I only play around with the BIOS if it has issues. Don't fix it if it ain't broke!
        • Yes but isn't the problem if you do screw the BIOS you can't boot your PC in order to reflash it?

          Usually the only alternative open is to boot another PC and remove the BIOS whilst the PC is running and insert the corrupted one then flash the old corrupted bios on this PC.

          This has always seemed a tad risky to me.

          Good point, and good workaround. Another, perhaps better, workaround is to get a functional bios out of a working machine and stick it in. This is easy if you have access to another, identical motherboard, which is a very good thing anyway IMHO, even if "access" means going down the the street to your local screwdriver shop.

          Third workaround: write the bios in a bios-writer. It's a standard flash chip after all, and if it isn't, you do not want to buy that computer. Flash writers are not expensive.
      • Or, if you have a Gigabyte mobo, you're all set. Just don't sync the dual bios until you're sure it's working.

  • Irony (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 25, 2002 @06:01AM (#4750086)
    OK, this is cool and all, but the quote:

    Ironically, twenty years ago this month Compaq introduced their Compaq portable computer with the first BIOS outside of IBM

    uses the idea of irony incorrectly, as many many people seem to do. It does not mean "coincidentally", as it is being used here. A sword swallower choking on a toothpick is irony. Completing a project 20 years after something similar was done is not.
    • A sword swallower choking on a toothpick is irony.

      No. Irony is incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs.

      • Re:Irony (Score:2, Insightful)

        by sparkane ( 145547 )

        A sword swallower choking on a toothpick is irony.

        No. Irony is incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs.

        Therefore, you consider that the event of a sword-swallower choking on a toothpick to be "congruous".

        Therefore you would expect a sword-swallower to choke on a toothpick?

        It seems ironic to me that your understanding of irony is not incorrect in itself, but is made incorrect because of your ridiculous (non-)application of the concept.

  • More a matter of principle than practice. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by joonasl ( 527630 ) <joonas.lyytinen@NospAm.iki.fi> on Monday November 25, 2002 @06:06AM (#4750105) Homepage
    Replacing the BIOS with an open source alternative is more a ideological victory than a practical one. But considering how large impact the first reverse engineered PC BIOS [wikipedia.org] has had in the advance of personal computers, this is a important step for the whole OS movement.

    • Re:More a matter of principle than practice. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by AxelTorvalds ( 544851 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @08:38AM (#4750663)
      It has huge practical benefits. LinuxBIOS like derivatives are used in tons of embedded projects. I can go from powerup to multitasking Linux kernel in about 3 seconds on a slow machine without doing a lot of optimization (ie decoding the kernel out of flash) I bet I could drop that the about 1.5 seconds if needed. init is running within about 5 seconds as is.

    • What I don't understand is why people aren't pushing for faster power-on times in practice for all PC's. Why can't something like DiskOnChip be used for all of the boot processes? Wouldn't boot be faster if all of /boot and some of /etc was on a faster read/write device like DiskOnChip on the motherboard? With RAM and Hard Disk prices dropping so fast, it's good for mass storage. But it seems that I see very few projects (other than the odd embedded project or two) that actually look at bringing a regular OS closer to the speed and responce times of a real-time OS. The only thing I would see BIOS helping in would be if it provided a WHAM-BAM up and running OS from power on. And there have to be a dozen possable solutions. I agree in principle it's worth hacking the BIOS, but I wonder if it's truely the best/fastest way to help system preformance for the typical workstation.

  • a few questions... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by xirtam_work ( 560625 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @06:08AM (#4750109)
    Will this be able to support special features on each motherboard that are present in a manufacturers own bios such as temperature sensors, clock speeds, case security features, etc.?

    Will we be able to 'plug-in' support for booting from external devices like usb/firewire drives, flash cards, pcmcia devices, usb memory keys, and transparently make them look like a normal floppy/hdd.

    Will this now make booting from a CD an older machine that doesn't presently possible?

    Will I be able to replace the linuxbio with the original again if everything buggers up?

    What about so called dual bios systems?

    • Will I be able to replace the linuxbio with the original again if everything buggers up?

      If it fails to the point of not being able to boot any media, then you are screwed if you have no other means of flashing the old BIOS onto that rom. If you can't at least boot a bootable floppy that has the old ROM image and flasher, then that motherboard is essentially useless until you can get a useful bootstrapping happening out a flashrom that is inserted in that board.

      However, you could restore the old BIOS onto the flashrom with a. an external ROM burning device (EPROM programmer style) or b. another motherboard, booted off it's own BIOS flashrom and then used to flash your other boards flashrom (with of course, a swapping of flashroms while the good motherboard is booted and still switched ON!).

      With b you could go from 1 out of 2 good motherboards to either 2 out of 2 or even 0 out of 2. ; )

      Don't short anything and get the flashroms around the right way and it might go well. It has worked for me in the past, but YMMV.

  • Palladium (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anarchofascist ( 4820 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @06:08AM (#4750111) Homepage Journal
    Does anyone know if this helps us in the war against Palladium and DRM?

    • Re:Palladium (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 25, 2002 @06:18AM (#4750151)
      If anything, I would say, it actually will _help_ Palladium and DRM. Palladium and DRM need to secure that they're running on trusted hardware to make sure they're not running inside a virtual machine, which would make the whole point of security moot.

      Actually, the project's homepage [umd.edu] says:

      We will begin by augmenting the LinuxBIOS source, in conjunction with the core developers of LinuxBIOS, with the AEGIS secure bootstrap implementation. AEGIS provides provable integrity guarantees, under the assumption of the physical security of the system in question, through the application of induction and strong cryptographic checks.


      So, open source or not, this will help you make sure that the hardware you're running on really is the hardware you're running on and hence to be trusted. Will that help against Palladium and DRM? I guess not...

      • Re:Palladium (Score:5, Interesting)

        by AuMatar ( 183847 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @06:44AM (#4750217)
        However, Palladium needs support in the BIOS level, IIRC. Without it, the OS can either pretend to have Palladium. Or the BIOS can trick the OS into believing that Palladium is oking everything. Palladium requires every link in the chain to be DRM compliant. With our own BIOS, we can now destroy a link even if the OS becomes mandated to contain DRM by law.
        • With our own BIOS, we can now destroy a link even if the OS becomes mandated to contain DRM by law. ...and I'm sure the big companies (or whoever signs software) will be GLAD to approve your software to re-flash the BIOS...

        • Re:Palladium (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Sentry21 ( 8183 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @01:03PM (#4752511) Journal
          I prefer to look at it as 'With our own BIOS, we can now invoke Palladium on our terms'

          If I'm running a server, I can enable Palladium, and require that all code be signed with my key, and thus that h4x0rz can't execute arbitrary code on my system. I could compile my kernels, sign them, move them over to the server, and install them when I want to upgrade. No one else can.

          This is, of course, assuming that it would all work the way I think it will, but who knows? Maybe we'd have to do another step (flash a chip or something) to get it working.

          Still, this is an important step in many many ways. Kudos to all those involved, good job guys.

          --Dan
    • Does anyone know if this helps us in the war against Palladium and DRM?

      No, because Palladium is optional, according to the official Microsoft FAQ it can be disabled if you so wish, and indeed the services it provides are only engaged when a program requests it.

      Unless things change significantly over at Redmond, there is no war.

  • what about TCPA, palladium? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Make ( 95577 ) <<max.kellermann> <at> <gmail.com>> on Monday November 25, 2002 @06:10AM (#4750121) Homepage
    will this conflict with microsoft's palladium plans? sounds like yes. will microsoft try to boycott this project? (rhethorical question..)

  • This Is Not An Announcement (Score:4, Informative)

    by DarkZero ( 516460 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @06:13AM (#4750132)
    Look at the mailing list that this is on: Linuxbios. The /. story acts like this is some sort of big announcement or press release, but it's really just the mailing list version of a standard WIP page [mame.net]. They're not being pretentious about it or patting themselves on the back, but the person that submitted this story certainly is.

  • This is great news! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by stevezero ( 620090 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @06:16AM (#4750142)
    As an 'end user' I would rather deal with multi-booting a computer without using LILO or GRUB.

    However, I have a few concerns, not on the technical side, but on the political/corporate side (and no, this is not a troll...sheesh)

    - Will Microsoft, in its zeal to maintain some semblance of control, seek to disable Windows from using motherboards with this bios...perhaps as one of their many 'updates'?

    - If Microsoft pushes forward their "trusted computing" through Palladium, how does this affect this project?

    - Since this appears to be a government-funded project, will Microsoft scream that this is unfair (not that they have a point, but will they?). Since the US government seems to be unable to discipline the company, I'm wondering how much power they REALLY have over the government.

    - Will this project eventually woo motherboard manufacturers were to leave the various BIOS companies (Award, etc.)?

    Sheesh, that was a lot of questions about M$, but I'm not obsessed (sharpening ax on grindstone)

  • Prohibited by palladium (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Erpo ( 237853 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @06:17AM (#4750147)
    This is great and all, but don't expect to be able to use it if MS's palladium system is successful. In a palladium pc, the bios serves as part of the Core Trusted Root for Measurement, meaning that installing an open-source, unsigned alternative is not an option. This is not a soft option, like installing an unsigned OS -- a palladium system will let you install any software you want, including an operating system, but it won't allow unsigned code to use its "secure" features (including access to its stored machine-specific private key used for encrypting machine-specific content, or the sign-only key pair used exclusively for validating the machine's trusted status).

    On the other hand, unsigned bioses are strictly not allowed. The bios is one of many hardware weak spots in palladium that, if compromised in an "adversarial environment" (yes, that's what they call it. ;) ) such as your home, would allow the user to totally subvert any security measure in place. Of course, palladium will be laughably easy to get past with direct unrestricted access to the physical device (as with EVERY Digital Restriction Mechanism), but it won't be legal to do so. Unless you perform an illegal (and risky if you're not an electronics guru) hardware mod, you won't be able to run (or rather, install) LinuxBIOS.

    The only way you'll see LinuxBIOS on a palladium machine would be if

    <disclaimer>
    Yeah, I clicked the link and read the page, but I didn't go further and investigate the features offered by LinuxBIOS.
    </disclaimer>

    a motherboard company took the LinuxBIOS source, modified it to lock out the user and perform DRM functions, and submitted it to MS for signing. Then LinuxBIOS could be installed in a palladium machine. Of course, the mobo company would still have to release the source code to their mod under the GPL, but that's not going to do the end user any good -- it won't get them a signed AND free bios. Remember all those stories about DRM killing OSS? Well, they were exaggerated for the most part, but this is what they were talking about.

    The point is, if we don't get the word out about palladium, it will be illegal to use this bios in its free state. That's the least of our worries.
    • The point is, if we don't get the word out about palladium, it will be illegal to use this bios in its free state. That's the least of our worries.

      I was under the impression that if you were to do this, it would simply be that the Palladium services would be unavailable. It certainly wouldn't be illegal, not even in the US unless you attempted to add Palladium into LinuxBIOS but allowing it to circumvent the system somehow, and even then it'd only be illegal in the US.

      • I was under the impression that if you were to do this, it would simply be that the Palladium services would be unavailable. It certainly wouldn't be illegal [...] If you were to do this (install a bios that does what you tell it to rather than what MS wants it to) you would have broken palladium. Once you can get the bios to tell the Core Root of Trust whatever you want, you can convince it you're running a secure OS on secure hardware. You could get access to keys and hardware crypto services from an unmodified linux kernel. That's circumvention, which is currently illegal.

        I suppose if you just replaced the bios and never used its capabilities you'd be ok, but the TCPA specs only say that the manufacturer "must control updates to the bios". I can only assume that this means previous bioses would only allow themselves to be replaced by signed code, and if you somehow got past that requirement, that would be circumvention.

    • GPL'ed BIOS not compatible with palladium (Score:5, Informative)

      by dmoen ( 88623 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @08:27AM (#4750606) Homepage
      I think the GPL prohibits the following:

      If a motherboard company took the LinuxBIOS source, modified it to lock out the user and perform DRM functions, and submitted it to MS for signing. Then LinuxBIOS could be installed in a palladium machine. Of course, the mobo company would still have to release the source code to their mod under the GPL, but that's not going to do the end user any good -- it won't get them a signed AND free bios.

      The GPL requires that you distribute *all* of the sources used to generate an executable. In this case, the executable includes a digital signature (it isn't runnable without the digital signature), and the source used to generate that digital signature is Microsoft's private key. (note: IANAL)

      Doug Moen.

      • In this case, the executable includes a digital signature (it isn't runnable without the digital signature), and the source used to generate that digital signature is Microsoft's private key. (note: IANAL)

        Neither am I, but it seems that the GNU GPL [gnu.org], section 3, specifically excludes any software that came with the OS or the compiler toolchain from the requirement of distribution of source code. Because the linker signs the app, those who distribute signed binaries of GPL'd software do not need to distribute the system vendor's private key.

    • Re:Prohibited by palladium (Score:4, Insightful)

      by puppetluva ( 46903 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @09:32AM (#4751015)
      Palladium has less to do with DRM than it has to do with Microsoft wanting to control the hardware manufacturers.

      Think about it. Microsoft can punish Dell by disallowing their BIOS interoperability with their Palladium platform.

      They've already dominated UP the stack (used their OS to monopolize the app vendors), now they are going DOWN the stack (using their OS monopoly to dominate the hardware vendors).

      Palladium is the worst thing for computing freedom we've seen yet.

  • virtual machine within BIOS (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jki ( 624756 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @06:18AM (#4750150) Homepage
    Sorry if this sounds like sci-fi, but I have started lately thinking whether it would be possible to launch a tiny REAL OS from within/integrated with the BIOS. A bit like vmware [vmware.com] but on a even lower level - I am thinking this might start being possible now that BIOS capabilities are increasing all the time as well. This would provide many interesting possibilities. Do you see this impossible for some reason? The vmware page says : "VMware technology is patented and patent-pending" - does anyone know exactly which patents they have and what limitations do those pose.

    • Re:virtual machine within BIOS (Score:5, Informative)

      by nomadicGeek ( 453231 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @07:59AM (#4750489)
      This has already been done a couple of times.

      There is a software product called Steeplechase that is used for PC based control. It loads a Real Time OS first. This handles all of the control application. Windows NT/2000 is then run as a low priority process of the RTOS. It allows the control application to respond to real time constraints and products the control application from a Windows crash.

      I believe that one of the Linux RTOS solutions uses a very similar approach.

      I also believe that this is how the VMware GSX server product works.
      • Thanks for these pointers. Steeplechase seems to be a close equivalent to what I was thinking about... looking for details on it brought me to for example this interesting article [linuxdevices.com] on a PC-based open architecture servo controller for CNC machining - interesting reading!
        • I've done some work with Steeplechase. It worked very well. The RTOS was totally memory resident and based on the RADISYS kernel. Once it loaded, you can disconnect the hard disk and it will keep running. This increased reliability. Keep in mind that Windows would crash but the RTOS monitored it. You could program the control system to continue operation or perform an orderly shutdown in that event.
    • Openfirmware [openfirmware.org] is based around an somehow similar idea: the firmware contains a Forth interpreter - a tiny virtual machine that can run programs. If I remember well, you can even write simple drivers if F-code and have them handle devices until the real OS starts.

      Running something like VM-ware at this stage makes little sense. The goal of the BIOS is to serve as a bootstraping system for the actual OS. Putting the full OS would increase the cost of the BIOS system and decrease flexibility. The original Macintoshes had a large part of the OS in ROM, but this has been abandonned years ago (they use Openfirmware now).

      Actually one Macintosh had a full boot disk in ROM (the Macintosh classic), you could mount this volume and boot from it. It contained a full OS including an Appleshare client so you could boot and run the computer without any disk...

  • Fully OpenSource PCs? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Big Mark ( 575945 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @06:26AM (#4750169)
    Will there be any OpenSourced hardware for these things to run on?

    Think about it: all I hear the OpenSource monkeys chatering about is OpenSource software (from Linux kernels and KDE to bare-metal stuff like this). All the hardware these things run on is just as proprietary as Windows XP.

    Now, while you can unscrew the case and have a peer inside (much as true programming gurus can see what a program does by doing cat /bin/ls | less ) you can't see what hardware bugs exist except by inferring their existance from their effects. Why don't people start designing open-source CPUs, chipsets etc?

    Of course, as there aren't all that many chip fabrication plants around we will have to rely on Intel and friends (enemies ?) taking the GPL/BSD/MIT/insert favourite licence here chip designs, making them and flogging them for loads (captive market, y'see. "Here is the chip design, you want this in Socket 468 format give us three hundred dollars". I think that the GPL allows that). I'm not all that sure how these licences would apply to chip designs but still. There must be some chip design geniuses out there who aren't employed by AMD and by making a few chip designs GPLd they could change the way the computing world operates. And get a high-paying job out of it as well ;-). It would mean an end to Pentium F00F-style bugs, at least...

    Just a few thoughts, I doubt it will ever happen but still...

    -Mark

  • Actually (Score:5, Informative)

    by Konster ( 252488 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @06:53AM (#4750240)
    This is fairly interesting. The board that they managed to boot is based upon the SiS 630e chip, which supports Pentium III/Celeron CPUs up to 1 GHz. I imagine you can scrounge one of these up with a Celeron for about $100. I wouldn't want to test this out on anything that isn't disposable and isn't anything other than a test platform. Still, having a spare BIOS chip laying around wouldn't hurt either. I wouldn't recommend trying this on any old board with any old chipset, unless you are willing to lose functionality of it either temporarily or permanently. A failed BIOS flash means that your system will have no way of bootstrapping itself unless you have a spare BIOS chip laying around (peovided that no hardware was damaged). This BIOS chip should have the BIOS version suitable for the board its made for. If you don't have access to a BIOS chip programmer, and you are somewhat of a cowboy, and you didn't reboot the PC with the failed BIOS flash, AND if you have a BIOS chip that is compatible with the one in the machine, gently pull the fragged BIOS out, put the new on in and flash it back to the factory AMI BIOS. BIOS r Fun. I hate them.

    • Re:Actually (Score:3, Informative)

      by Lumpy ( 12016 )
      ummm no...

      you can easily perform a hot-swap of the bios chip to flash it. I have done it at least 20 times for I-opener hackers around here. Boot with good bios , load the flash program. yank good bios chip. insert target chip CORRECTLY. flash it.

      voila... nothing difficult at all.. granted it takes someone with an IQ and some very general knowlege about electronics anf digital electronics. but is easily done and at a minimal risk.. (Yes you CAN blow the hell out of everything.. set fire to the cat, kill a thousand children, etc by doing this.. but hey, it's fun!)
      remember, those not willing to take risks for learning are those that never get very much knowlege.

  • Betcha... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Amadodd ( 620353 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @07:02AM (#4750259)
    China would love this. Another step closer to paying no techno tax to the west.

  • Palladium for linux? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 25, 2002 @07:26AM (#4750348)
    Has anyone actually read the links? [umd.edu] This isn't the linuxBios project [lanl.gov], it's a seperate project that adds 'trusted boot' to it.

    From the umd site:
    "Upon the completion of our research, open and closed source operating systems will have a high assurance bootstrap process available on a wide array of personal computer systems. In addition, the bootstrap process will include the capability for using cryptographic hardware-- in some cases tamper resistant. Providing a ``true'' trusted path from the power switch to the Operating System."

    Sound familliar?

  • how about bugs? (Score:4, Funny)

    by zloppy303 ( 411053 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @07:35AM (#4750382)
    After the upgrade:

    Hmmm.... computer doesn't boot anymore, lets send in a bug report... errrmm..... ;)

    • Re:how about bugs? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by RocketJeff ( 46275 )
      After the upgrade:

      Hmmm.... computer doesn't boot anymore, lets send in a bug report... errrmm..... ;)

      What sort of geek has only one computer or is silly enough to 'upgrade' the bios of all of them at the same time?

  • Could this be adapted for the Xbox? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by salimfadhley ( 565599 ) <ip.stodge@org> on Monday November 25, 2002 @08:30AM (#4750618) Homepage Journal
    Imagine if this could be made to work on an MS Xbox? It would transform that clunky Halo-player into a practical work computer - or even an affordable clustering machine.
  • Call me crazy, but it doesn't seem like they've done anything too exciting. I mean, Bochs already emulates a full x86 PC, it doesn't seem like it would take a genius to use that code to replace part of a real PC.

  • Desperately needed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SurfsUp ( 11523 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @11:51AM (#4751986)
    Bios development has stagnated. Actually, it stagnated immediately after the Phoenix, Award etc bioses came out in 1982. Since then, bioses have stayed essentially as awkward, feature-limited and buggy as ever. Minor improvements: guess the hard drive geometry, whoopie. Choices of and control over boot devices are still pathetically limited, and the way bios extensions are integrated (e.g., Intel boot agent, yuck) is user-offensive.

    1) I want to boot off my compact flash reader for crying out loud, how hard is that? Will you show me an Award or Phoenix bios that can do it?

    2) I want just one pause at boot where I can select either which OS configuration to boot, or alternatively, bios configuration. Not endless droning sequences of "now you can hit F2 to configure bios", "now you can hit Ctrl-S to configure PXE", "now you can hit Ctrl-R to configure raid". As a user interface that's just miserable. You have to sit their staring at the monitor waiting for just the right 2 seconds to hit exactly the right key, and if you miss, it's back to the beginning for you. With some boots taking two minutes that turns into a major timewaster. How hard is it to provide a framework so the OS boot selection and bios configuration are on the same menu? Answer: not hard, unless your name is Award or Phoenix.

    The Bios used to be a convenient place for OEMs to hide crucial configuration details, keeping it all in the familly so to speak, but since that stuff has been largely decoded by OSS hordes and is ignored by Windows in favor built-in drivers, it's become increasing pointless. The bios has gone back to being what it always should have been: a way to boot. But the bioses served up to us by the incumbent manufacturers aren't even good at that.

    Hence the need for OSS to invade that bastion of proprietary, closed code which once seemed to mysterious. It's not any more, simply because of the relentless pressure for components to standardize. It's now possible to write a bios that relies on such standard features as pci topology discovery to do its work.

    At the very least, the general availablity of community-developed, peer-reviewed bioses will force the leading bios vendors to get off their tails and fix up their code to be less pathetically unusable than it is at present. At best, we're shortly arriving at the time where reflashing your bios is the very next thing you do after loading in the Linux installation CD.

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