LinuxBIOS

If you're looking for a replacement for your normal BIOS, take a look at the LinuxBIOS project. With a little bit of hardware initialization and a compressed Linux kernel, this software can be booted from a cold start in just a few seconds. Originally developed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the project was born out of a desire to have cluster nodes be controlled by the operating system from power on. Though this might sound like a small innovation, there are plenty of other benefits to using LinuxBIOS. For instance, you only need two working motors to boot (the CPU fan and power supply), and you'll have complete freedom from buggy proprietary BIOS code. These benefits have allowed LinuxBIOS to gain traction with vendors in both the high-performance computing and embedded computing markets.

With newer systems, you don't even need moving parts to get started. The no-moving-parts 16-node cluster being built at LANL demonstrates this, with the ability to run from a battery, boot in 10 seconds, and be controlled from a laptop (which still has a few moving parts).

The latest release of LinuxBIOS adds initial support for the ASI MB-5BLGP (Neoware Eon 4000s), as well as extending PCI functions. There are also numerous major bug fixes and some code cleanup, which makes this version better than ever. You won't regret trying out LinuxBIOS for your system.