Orna Agmon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Next Monday (27/9/2004), 18:30, the Haifa Linux Club will once > again meet to hear Dr. Oleg Goldshmidt (from IBM HRL) talk about: > > "Look, Ma, No BIOS!" > > A Hands-Off Introduction to LinuxBIOS > > Since we do not have an abstract for this one,
I apologize for this, I was one of the victims of last week's strike and my arrival back in Israel was delayed by a couple of days. Since I was in a country whose hotels and airports have less Wi-Fi access points than those of Elbonia, I did not have a computer with me and could not work on the abstract or slides there. The abstract follows, and I'll send the slides to Orr and Orna tomorrow. LinuxBIOS aims to replace the normal BIOS found on PCs and other computers. Instead of the BIOS, a Linux kernel boots essentially from a cold state, after less than 20 instrucions needed to get into 32-bit mode and initialize DRAM and other hardware required before the kernel can take over. The original motivation for development of LinuxBIOS was management of large clusters: imagine walking around a few hundred nodes with a keyboard and a monitor to change a BIOS setting. In addition, dealing with the BIOS code when developing an unusual or experimental system is less than pleasant, a full OS that can be tweaked with the conventional toolchain behaves much nicer. LinuxBIOS also boots much faster than a traditional BIOS (current record is about 3 seconds), which has generated interest in the electronics industry. This talk will present a brief history of BIOS, summarize the current - less than perfect - state of affairs, and give a "hands-off" overview of LinuxBIOS. Here "hands-off" means that the speaker has read much of the documentation and the code, but has not (yet?) tried it on real hardware[1]. The overview will cover lab installation of LinuxBIOS (boards with preinstalled LinuxBIOS can be bought from a variety of vendors), its basic operation, and usage of LinuxBIOS as a boot environment, i.e. booting another OS from it. [1] The speaker has *seen* hardware that runs LinuxBIOS ;-) -- Oleg Goldshmidt | [EMAIL PROTECTED] ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
