Free BIOS (was Resources for DOS (was: DOS Compatable OS))

Am 16 Dec 2005 8:23 meinte Robert Armstrong: Well Bob, there is, and there isn't. The name FreeBIOS is of course taken by a project, wich seams to have stalled about 5 years ago, at least according to the last version I could find at sourceforge http://sourceforge.net/projects/freebios/ But there's OpenBIOS: http://www.openbios.info/ While FreeBIOS was aimed as a replacement for a genuine x86 BIOS, there's also OpenBIOS whose goal is even more far fetched by aiming to be CPU independent (!) To reach this, some real old knowledge has been dug out: The BIOS is written in Forth - now called FCode and supplied with a C to FCode compiler for peole who speak only a single letter (aka non literate programming :) OpenBIOS is quite active and already in a state that can be used for most ordinary systems. Now, a complete different aproach here is LinuxBIOS http://www.linuxbios.org/index.php/Main_Page The idea is to just setup the very minimalistic needed things like Memory, then unpack a Linux kernal into RAM and let the Linux do the further hardware initializaetion and have it bootup whatever system should finaly be bootet. To my understanding the project diverted a bit from it's original course by adding more and more init-code to the added (non Linux) code, but it's still worth a look. Results on x86 hardware (386+) is quite inplessive. On the other hand it's (as often with linux) a rather x86 specific thing. Personaly I would rather go with OpenBIOS. Gruss H. -- VCF Europa 7.0 am 29/30.April und 01.Mai 2006 in Muenchen http://www.vcfe.org/