LinuxBIOS SDK

1. Introduction

1.1 LinuxBIOS

LinuxBIOS is an open source project which aims to replace regular BIOS on PC's and Alpha. It was started at Cluster Reseach Lab at the Advanced Computing Laboratory at Los Alamos National Laboratory for clustering research. Its main goal is to have the OS gain control of the system from power on. Beside this, it also solves other traditional BIOS existing problems, for instance, long startup time, security and difficult to manage. It is also possible to put root disk within the LinuxBIOS such that no harddisk is required. It is perfect for projects like firewall, proxy, webserver, cluster and X-terminal.

1.2 LinuxBIOS SDK

1.2.1 Introduction

LinuxBIOS SDK provides a development envirnoment in which developers do not need to spend time to buy different components from different vendors and worry about the compatability. It also comes with pre-built images and a set of pre-configured applications to jumpstart your project.

1.2.2 Kernel

This version of LinuxBIOS SDK uses the Linux Kernel 2.4.17 + several LinuxBIOS specific patches. Kernel can be found at http://www.kerne.org and patches can be found at http://www.cwlinux.com/download

1.2.3 Library

LinuxBIOS SDK uses uClibc, a lite version C library, to reduce the footprint of the program size, and shared libraries are being used extensively. However, not all packages can take advantage of uClibc because of its limited fuctionality. For those packages, they are compiled and linked statically with glibc.

1.2.4 Supported Packages

LinuxBIOS comes with the following packags:

uClibc Base Package Version busybox 0.60.2 gpm 1.19.3 iptables 1.2.5 ppp 2.4.1 squid 2.4.STABLE3 thttpd 2.20c tinylogin 0.8.0 openssl 0.9.6c zlib 1.1.3

glibc Base Package Version flnx 0.60.2 microwin 0.84pre8 openssl 0.9.6c viewml 0.21 w3c-libwww 5.3.2 xmlrpc-c 0.9.9

1.2.5 Supported Filesystem

LinuxBIOS SDK supports Ext2, Cramfs and Minix such that developers can choose what is suitable for their projects. By default, it will build root filesystem in Cramfs format.

1.3 LinuxBIOS Configuration

LinuxBIOS SDK comes with: