Jonathan McDowell wrote:
Interesting to see LinuxBIOS mentioned, as this is something I've wanted to play with for ages but never found a correctly shaped tuit.
What's it like?
In what way?
Well any experience of it is interesting, to be honest.
I ended up with an image that did serial console from the very beginning of boot and would then launch etherboot allowing me to boot from the network or it would time out waiting for a keypress after 5s and boot a kernel from disk. It boots a lot faster than a conventional BIOS (which is what interests a lot of people in it) and it gives you a lot more control (which is what interests me).
So that's serial console from right at the start of the BIOS? Interesting - I can see uses for that (not that dissimilar to yours, but mostly for remote purposes, eg PCs in unattended buildings).
My main reason for looking into it was that it looked like a fun thing to play with. But we're increasingly starting to look at using PCs as black boxes for specific applications, many of them not headless (eg media PCs etc). I'm interested in speeding the boot process and in controlling the screen output during that process (making it look a little more user friendly than your typical PC boot process).
If you have a supported motherboard then you can cross your fingers and try to build and flash an image. However if it goes wrong you're a bit stuffed.
I might "invest" in a cheap EPROM programmer so I can play, but having looked at the BIOS Saviours in the past they're great products but overkill for anything I'm doing. I do have an old EPROM blower (and a UV prom erasor) kicking around somewhere, but I think technology might have moved on a bit past them now.
I know that some mobos have dual BIOS anyway (I think some Gigabyte boards did?), I presume that's a good starting point assuming the board is supported.