LinuxBIOS 2-2510 review

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LinuxBIOS project is aimed at replacing the normal BIOS with a little bit of hardware initialization and a compressed Linux kernel th

License: GPL (GNU General Public License)
File size: 1508K
Developer: LinuxBIOS Developers
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LinuxBIOS project is aimed at replacing the normal BIOS with a little bit of hardware initialization and a compressed Linux kernel that can be booted from a cold start.

The project was started as part of clustering research work in the Cluster Reseach Lab at the Advanced Computing Laboratory at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The primary motivation behind the project was the desire to have the operating system gain control of a cluster node from power on.

Other beneficial consequences of using LinuxBIOS include needing only two working motors to boot (cpu fan and power supply), fast boot times (current fastest is 3 seconds), and freedom from proprietary (buggy) BIOS code, to name a few.

These secondary benefits are numerous and have helped gain support from many vendors in both the high performance computing as well as embedded computing markets.

Note that, on newer systems, there need be no moving parts at all. At LANL, we are building a new 'no moving parts' 16-node cluster to demonstrate this capability. The cluster will fit in a toolbox, run from a battery, boot in 10 seconds, and be controlled from your laptop (which, sadly, will still have a few moving parts).

What's New in This Release:
Support was added for the IEI NOVA-4899R 5.25 SBC mainboard, for ASD AE49F2008, for the SyncMOS S29C51001T, S29C51002T, S29C51004T, and S29C31004T.
Many bugfixes were made.

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