Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

Since the "World's First Motherboard Using LinuxBIOS Released" hype at the beginning of this year (which was incorrect btw; it was not the first supported desktop board, there were many others before), LinuxBIOS hasn't been in the news very much. That doesn't mean that there was no progress, however. We've been working hard behind the scenes to improve the LinuxBIOS code, add support for new chipsets and boards, and advance the upcoming next-generation LinuxBIOSv3 version which will brings lots of great improvements in various areas.

Here's a random collection of stuff that happened in the last few months.

New chipsets:

• AMD K8 / NVIDIA MCP55, contributed by Yinghai Lu of AMD
• VIA VT82C686A/B southbridge, contributed by Corey Osgood
• AMD Geode LX / CS5536, contributed by Marc Jones and Jordan Crouse of AMD
• Intel 810 northbridge, contributed by Corey Osgood
• AMD K8 / VIA K8T890 / VT8237R, contributed by Rudolf Marek / Corey Osgood
• AMD K8 / SiS761GX / SiS966(L), contributed by Morgan Tsai of SiS

New mainboards:

• Sun Ultra40, contributed by Ronald G. Minnich (LinuxBIOS project founder)
• K9SD Master-S2R (MS-9185), contributed by Bingxun Shi of MSI
• K9SD Master Series (MS-9282), contributed by Bingxun Shi of MSI
• GIGABYTE GA-M57SLI-S4, contributed by Yinghai Lu of AMD
• NVIDIA l1_2pvv, contributed by Yinghai Lu of AMD
• Supermicro H8DMR, contributed by Yinghai Lu of AMD
• Tyan S2912, contributed by Yinghai Lu of AMD
• Tyan S1846, contributed by myself
• AMD Norwich (AMD Geode LX reference platform), contributed by Marc Jones and Jordan Crouse of AMD
• IGEL Winnet III thin client, contributed by myself
• ASUS A8N-E, contributed by Phillip Degler
• IEI JUKI-511P, contributed by Nikolay Petukhov
• IEI ROCKY-512, contributed by Nikolay Petukhov
• AMD DB800 (a.k.a. Salsa), contributed by Marc Jones and Jordan Crouse of AMD
• ASUS MEW-VM, contributed by Corey Osgood
• Artec Group DBE61, contributed by Marc Jones and Jordan Crouse of AMD
• PC Engines ALIX.1C, contributed by Ronald G. Minnich
• MSI MS-6178, contributed by myself
• MSI MS-7260 (K9N Neo), contributed by myself
• IGEL-316 thin client, contributed by Jürgen Beisert
• AXUS TC320 thin client, contributed by Jürgen Beisert
• GIGABYTE GA-2761GXDK (Churchill), contributed by Morgan Tsai of SiS
• And a bunch of older Intel 440BX based boards, contributed by myself with some help by testers via IRC: ASUS P2B/P2B-F/P3B-F, A-Trend ATC-6220, AZZA PT-6IBD, Biostar M6TBA, Compaq Deskpro EN SFF P600, GIGABYTE GA-6BXC
• ASUS A8V-E SE, contributed by Rudolf Marek

Note that not all of these may be 100% supported, some may still be work in progress with some TODO items left... Check the LinuxBIOS wiki or ask on the mailing list for details.

The future

Most work will probably go into LinuxBIOSv3 in the future, in order to make it suitable for productive use.
Of course, work on new chipsets and boards will continue, too. For example the VIA CN700 chipset (plus Jetway J7F2WE board using it) is being worked on right now, probably also several others I don't know about.

Call for board testers

If you're interesting in trying out LinuxBIOS, please check the list of supported motherboards. If your board is not listed there, but the chipset is already supported we can probably add support for your board relatively easy with some testing help from you.

Please contact us on IRC or preferrably on the mailing list if you want to help get your board supported!

An (incomplete) list of good candidate boards for future support is available in the wiki.

Thanks!

We're very grateful for the many contributors who have helped us with testing and fixing existing code, or who even contributed code for new chipsets and motherboards. Thanks a lot!

Many thanks especially to all hardware vendors who have been supporting us or even actively contributed by submitting code for their chipsets or boards (recently or in the past), including AMD, SiS, VIA, MSI, Tyan, Artec Group, and many others. Your efforts are very appreciated. Thanks!

Highly recommended for anybody who might be even remotely interested in LinuxBIOS:

There's a video recording (OGG, 234 MB) of the LinuxBIOS talk at FOSDEM 2007 by LinuxBIOS-founder Ron Minnich.

The talk is about LinuxBIOS, its history, how it works, what the main challenges are, where it's used today and what the future will likely hold. Watch it, you won't regret it.

And if you want to know more, or maybe even consider contributing, head over to linuxbios.org or contact the mailing list.

No, I'm not dead, just very very busy...

There have been quite a few interesting new Free Software projects and news popping up recently (or I only recently noticed them):

• The GPLv3 is back in the news: Stallman, Torvalds, Moglen share views on DRM and GPLv3. Very interesting read!
• Ditto for the next-generation Creative Commons licenses: Creative Commons Version 3.0 - Public Discussion Launched. See also Evan Prodromou's Debian Creative Commons Workgroup report.
• On to more practical things: I have put quite some time into trying out and working on LinuxBIOS, a free replacement of traditional, closed-source, proprietary BIOSes. More details on that later... If you want to check it out, and/or help (patches are always welcome), have a look at the wiki or the mailing list.
• The Call for nominations for the 2006 FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software has been posted. Who do you think should get the award this year?
• Intel has released Free Software drivers (2D and 3D!) for their Intel® 965 Express Chipset family graphics controller. The code is licensed partly under the MIT license, partly the GPL. Thanks Intel!
• Apple has released some more code as Free Software: Apple Opens Up: Kernel, Mac OS Forge, iCal Server, Bonjour, Launchd. Thanks Apple! They switched from the APSL 2.0 to the Apache license 2.0 (at least for some of the code), not sure why. They're both considered "Open Source", and both are GPL-incompatible.
• GNU Classpath 0.92 "Bling! Bling!" has been released, with full support for 2D graphics. One step closer to a free Java environment (not that I would recommend anybody to write stuff in Java if you have a choice)...