The Linux BIOS Project

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(Last updated: Jun. 15, 2000)

What is Linux BIOS?

We are working on making Linux our BIOS. In other words, we plan to replace the BIOS in NVRAM on our Rockhopper cluster with a Linux image, and instead of running the BIOS on startup we'll run Linux. We have a number of reasons for doing this, among them:

We want our cluster nodes to come up go out to the net for direction on how they should boot (diskless, local disk, reload, etc.). While there is a standard for this (PXE from Intel) it has a lot of limitations. Also, we have no desire to burn 16-bit EPROMs for every type of network card we ever get, and both the netboot and PXE software require this at some point.
By far the most important function of the BIOS is to support obsolete code, such as DOS. Modern operating systems such as Linux have absolutely no use for what the BIOS does. Still worse, many BIOSes do a poor job of configuring the PCI bus for systems such as Linux. Replacing the BIOS with Linux will allow faster reboots, and better system configuration.
The NVRAM can be written with the kernel we most commonly use. We can envision booting Linux in 10 milliseconds or so -- a very attractive idea.

How it will work

PC resets, and jumps to 0xffff:0 (remember, at reset, the Pentium is emulating a 20-year-old microprocessor, the 16-bit 8086). This address is in NVRAM. We will have rewritten NVRAM with a stub of OpenBIOS.
Using the OpenBIOS startup code, we initialize the chipset so that interrupts work, and DRAM is on.
As soon as we have DRAM we turn on the GDT and jump to 32-bit assembly.
32-bit assembly does a bit more work and jumps to C.
The C code is short: it gunzips the Linux image out of NVRAM and jumps to it.
From that point on, you're in Linux: do what you please. If your kernel is so equipped, it can locate the real kernel to run and boot that instead (see below: we have Linux booting Linux now).

Current status:

We have OpenBIOS running on our L440GX+ motherboards. To make this work we use the ldbios program to write our test bios to memory at 0xffff:0, and jump to it. Our code successfully gunzips Linux and jumps to it.
We have Linux booting Linux. So our NVRAM-based Linux can decide to boot something else.
We're currently badly stuck on flashing the NVRAM on the L440GX+, and the docs we've found at intel.com have not helped. Any advice here would be very helpful. We have used the devbios but that program really can't handle the 1MB NVRAMs at present. We can read the 1MB NVRAM in Linux by mmap'ing /dev/mem at 0xfff00000. Writes to this location don't result in expected behavior from the flash device, i.e. the CUI state machine doesn't start returning chip type info after you write 0x90 to offset 0 in the flash. Maybe I've jumpered the board wrong? Maybe there's a trick bit in the PIIX4E I haven't set? If you've done this, write me. If you think you know something, write me.

For more info, visit the Linux BIOS Home Page (located here) or send email to linuxbios@acl.lanl.gov. Current LinuxBIOS contributors are Ron Minnich (rminnich@acl.lanl.gov, James Hendricks(jimi@lanl.gov), and Dale Webster(dalew@lanl.gov).

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