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Subject: [open-source] ANNOUNCE: LinuxBIOS booting Windows 2000 (free software BIOS)
From: William Arbaugh <waa@cs.umd.edu>


We're happy to announce that we've successfully booted Windows 2000
without a legacy  proprietary BIOS. We accomplished this by developing
software that combined elements from two very successful projects:
LinuxBIOS and BOCHS. The Etherboot project also helped in various ways.

As a result, we now have a completely free software replacement for the
BIOS that supports (without modification) either LILO or GRUB as
bootloaders, and Linux, OpenBSD, and Windows 2000 as operating systems
(NOTE: We're still working on supporting FreeBSD and Windows XP. We
expect that improving ATA support will permit Win98 and WinXP to boot,
and finishing PIRQ support will permit FreeBSD to boot.)

Motherboard support is limited at this time, but we hope to expand that
along with LinuxBIOS.

More details can be found at:

http://www.missl.cs.umd.edu/Projects/sebos/main.shtml

and

http://www.missl.cs.umd.edu/Projects/sebos/phase2.shtml

The GPL'd source for our contribution, ADLO, will be included in the
LinuxBIOS CVS tree shortly. ADLO is the "glue" that combines the
initialization code from LinuxBIOS with the BOCHS BIOS code-- creating
a true free software BIOS.

Ironically, twenty years ago this month Compaq introduced their Compaq
portable computer with the first BIOS outside of IBM, see
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=547.

Adam Sulmicki
Adam Agnew
William Arbaugh

This work has been funded by a grant from DARPA under the CHATS program.



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