Design your own bios

[Modelworks]

found the article on slashdot , but the link below are the actual article.
http://www.linuxbios.org/index.php/Welcome_to_LinuxBIOS

LinuxBIOS is a Free Software project aimed at replacing the proprietary BIOS (firmware) you can find in most of today's computers.

It performs just a little bit of hardware initialization and then executes a so-called payload, for example a Linux kernel, FILO, GRUB2, OpenBIOS, Open Firmware, SmartFirmware, GNUFI (UEFI), Etherboot, ADLO (for booting Windows and OpenBSD), Plan 9, or memtest86.


100% Free Software (GPL), no royalties, no license fees!
Fast boot times (3 seconds from power-on to Linux console)
Avoids the need for a slow, buggy, proprietary BIOS
Runs in 32-Bit protected mode almost from the start
Written in C, contains virtually no assembly code
Supports a wide variety of hardware and payloads

I knew they were working on making custom bios a while back but didn't realize how far it has really come. Its not working on the latest boards but what they have done so far is a great step forward.

Maybe in the future we will be able to have a bios that we can choose what options to support on any motherboard.

Another link from the site on how winxp uses the bios, indepth, but good info.

http://www.missl.cs.umd.edu/winint/index2.html