It's time to kiss your BIOS goodbye!
Oct 24th, 11:56 UTC
With all the talk about open source operating systems and related software, how
often do we hear about open source BIOS? Sure enough, there are a few ongoing
projects such as LinuxBIOS. But to date, there has been no truly well supported
effort to provide comprehensive technology for system initialization and startup.
That situation now appears to be changing as a result of some new software being
developed by Red Hat, called "RedBoot". The RedBoot project is new, and there is
much yet to be done -- but RedBoot may soon be "booting" that proprietary BIOS
out of many embedded Linux (and other) systems.
If you've ever tried to use an embedded PC in a non-PC application, you probably
had to struggle with issues like eliminating a long list of copyright messages, creating a
custom splash screen, speeding the boot process, supporting custom hardware
initialization, or adding robust system diagnostics. RedBoot to the rescue!
Here's a new RedBoot whitepaper by Paul Beskeen, director of engineering for Red
Hat's embedded runtime engineering team in Europe. It provides an introduction and
overview of RedBoot, and points to the online RedBoot documentation and source
code . . .
Read RedBoot Whitepaper
(Submitted by Rick Lehrbaum of LinuxDevices.com)
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