First desktop motherboard supported by LinuxBIOS: GIGABYTE M57SLI-S4

[freebird]

Hi,

The GIGABYTE M57SLI-S4 [1] is the first-ever desktop motherboard
supported by a Free & Open Source BIOS, thanks to AMD engineer Yinghai
Lu who released GPL-licensed code last month. This state-of-the-art
motherboard is based on the NVIDIA nForce 570 SLI chipset and AMD's
latest Socket AM2. It contains tons of advanced features such as:

Support for AMD Athlon 64 X2, Athlon 64 FX and Athlon 64 processors
2X PCI Express x16 slots
3X PCI Express x1 slots
2X PCI slots
3X 1394a (FireWire) ports
10X USB 2.0
16GB maximum memory
SATA RAID
6X SATA 3Gb/s slots.

This motherboard can be obtained today from many retail and online
stores [2] and the source code for the BIOS can be downloaded from the
LinuxBIOS SVN server [3].
This is a huge victory in the quest for a completely Free & Open
Source general-purpose computer that enables users to have full
control over their own hardware. The Free Software Foundation has made
the campaign for a Free BIOS a top priority because it is a key
component in the software stack of personal computers [4]. The need
for a Free BIOS is even more pressing since DRM and Treacherous
Computing have found their way into some proprietary BIOSes and EFI.
From a practical perspective, LinuxBIOS removes the need for ugly
hacks and workarounds in the kernel that compensate for buggy BIOSes –
we can now fix the BIOS ourselves.

read full:
*permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/496453

 

[ravi_9793]

thanks for the info dude.

but wht u mean by motherboard supported by LinuxBIOS
I dont understand this.

 

[nishant_nms]

he meant that it was the first mobo to have LinuxBIOS

 

[ravi_9793]

Is linux BIOS different than Windows BIOS??????

 

[freebird]

there is no such windows only BIOS.Linux BIOS is a Free Software/Open Source Project that tries to solve many such bottle-necks in the conventional closed propreitory BIOS firmware.

LinuxBIOS is a Free Software project aimed at replacing the proprietary BIOS (firmware) you can find in most of today's computers.
It performs just a little bit of hardware initialization and then executes a so-called payload, for example a Linux kernel, FILO, GRUB2, OpenBIOS, Open Firmware, SmartFirmware, GNUFI (UEFI), Etherboot, ADLO (for booting Windows 2000 and OpenBSD), Plan 9, or memtest86.


Benefits — There are many reasons for using LinuxBIOS.

• 100% Free Software (GPL), no royalties, no license fees!
• Fast boot times (3 seconds from power-on to Linux console)
• Avoids the need for a slow, buggy, proprietary BIOS
• Runs in 32-Bit protected mode almost from the start
• Written in C, contains virtually no assembly code
• Supports a wide variety of hardware and payloads
• Further features: netboot, serial console, remote flashing, ...

Use Cases — LinuxBIOS can be deployed in a wide range of scenarios.

• Standard desktop computers and servers
• Clusters, high-performance computing
• Embedded solutions, appliances, terminals
• Small form factor computers, Home-theater PCs (HTPC)
• No-moving-parts solutions (except for CPU fan & power supply)
• Various non-standard scenarios (e.g. FPGA in Opteron socket)
• One Laptop per Child (OLPC)

just read fully @:

*linuxbios.org/index.php/Main_Page

it really means a gr8 news along with Open Hardware Project:
*www.opencollector.org/Whyfree/
*en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_hardware#Notable_projects_and_collections