BIOS boots to Linux in one second

Firmware company General Software announced that it is selling customized, quick-booting versions of its Linux-compatible BIOS firmware to the medical device industry. The company says its "Embedded BIOS with StrongFrame Technology" can boot to lilo (Linux loader) in less than a second.

Fast boot times are key in the medical device market, where products compete on "time to waveform" (TTW), General Software said. Yet, most BIOSes available for x86 chipsets were built for the desktop market, and thus have not been optimized in this area, according to Steve Jones, General Software CTO.

Jones explained, "Hard drive spin-up normally takes so long that the BIOS has to wait for it anyway. Take away the spin-up time and you're left with POST that should complete in hundreds of milliseconds, but instead takes tens of seconds."

Jones said that after hard drive spin-up delays, waiting for video card firmware to load is another major time-waster. "Depending on the video controller, it can take between 0.5 and 5 seconds, typically. Next to hard drive spin-up, this is actually the most significant part of POST and accounts for most of the time spent in the one-second measurement here. Other things, like keyboard controller initialization, mouse and keyboard device initialization, and USB initialization, all take hundreds of microseconds, and basically nickel-and-dime the POST time."

Jones said the claimed sub-second boot time to lilo was measured between pushing the reset button on a Soyo motherboard with an Intel 815-class chipset, and the moment when the lilo prompt appeared, showing that the drive was being read. Jones says the feat was accomplished by using "Quick Boot" tuning tools available in the General Software Embedded BIOS Adaptation Kit, which is said to offer more than 1,000 configuration options at the source level. Using it, General Software or Kit licensees can tune x86 BIOS code to specific hardware, eliminating the time-consuming scans and unneeded code branches found in desktop x86 BIOS code. Another touted benefit is faster certification, since there are fewer code-paths to test.

Jones said General Software also created one BIOS capable of booting Windows Vista to a usable desktop in 24 seconds, where the same board with a traditional BIOS took 72 seconds. Much of the speed-up was attributed to building a UDMA-capable driver into the BIOS, enabling it to load the OS into memory much faster than traditional BIOSes, which use slow PIO (programmed I/O) data transfers.

General Software said its medical device customers include Siemens Acuson and GE Healthcare.

Availability

Embedded BIOS with StrongFrame Technology is available now for a wide variety of devices, including medical equipment.

Asus: alas poor Linux Eee PC we fare thee well?

Since Asus announced that it would release a Windows XP version of phenomenally popular Eee PC for the extra cost of a Windows license, market pundits have been kissing the cheaper Xandros Linux version goodbye. However, Asus is ambivalent about the issue.

According to a number of reports, Asus expects the Windows XP version of its sub-1kg notebook with 512MB RAM, 4GB Flash and a 7inch screen, to comprise more than 60% of sales of the device, leaving the Linux version in its dust. However, the company insists that the Linux version will still be sold. And why wouldn't it?

Ever since it came on the market in October 2007, the Linux version of the Eee PC has sold hundreds of thousands of units worldwide. For users who want a small lightweight computer that can surf the Web in Wi-Fi hot spots, exchange Skype messages and emails using Gmail, do basic office productivity functions using Open Office, the Linux Eee PC is perfect.

Linux and FOSS were made for such a machine - lean, cheap, easy to use and nothing more to spend. And certainly nothing extra to spend on resource sucking anti-virus and anti-spyware packages.

So why has Asus decided to put out more expensive Windows XP versions of the Eee PC? Simple - people want them.

Earlier this year, a friend showed me his Eee PC recently purchased in an electronics market in Thailand. It was running a version of Windows XP that had been loaded by the store. In fact he says that's the reason he bought it. He was browsing stores looking at Linux Eee PCs with mild interest but as soon as he came across a unit that was running Windows, he snapped it up. Why?

My friend is a self-confessed unsophisticated tech junkie but when it comes to computers all he knows is Windows. He believes Windows is better because that's what he's familiar with. He can also run iTunes on Windows (he's also a music junkie) and Skype is more advanced on Windows. He can even run IE7 and Outlook Express (heaven knows why he would want to).
n a nutshell, multiply my unsophisticated consumer friend by hundreds of millions and you've got a ready made market for a Windows XP version of the Eee PC, complete with its bloatware, susceptibility to viruses, system slow-downs and freezes while the security software does its regular scans and its inflated price. Like it or not, it's the way things are.

Meanwhile, does this portend the demise of the Linux Eee PC? Absolutely not! They're still flying off store shelves in volumes that no other Linux consumer computer has in history. For the first time ever, I can go down to a local major electronics and office products chain store and buy a Linux Eee PC off the shelf. The market for consumer Linux computers has been established. Chances are Asus will keep it that way.

Jim Zemlin is the executive director of the Linux Foundation. Formerly executive director of the Free Standards Group, Zemlin also has served as vice president of marketing for Covalent Technologies, providing products and services for the Apache Web server. Zemlin has also been a keynote speaker at industry and financial conferences including Gartner's Open Source Conference and Linux World. Zemlin met with InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill this week to talk about Linux topics ranging from overtures to Microsoft to the progress of Linux on the desktop.

InfoWorld: What's the role of the Linux Foundation?

Zemlin: We obviously are the home of [Linux founder] Linus Torvalds. We sort of focus on three main areas in terms of the platform. The first area is to promote Linux as a technology solution, and that's across embedded, mobile, server, desktop computing. We respond to competitive marketing on behalf of the platform, so when competitors are out spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt about open source or if there is a general lack of understanding of open-source licensing practices or governance practices, our organization plays a role educating [the] industry and end-users on those issues. We protect the platform by allowing people like Linus Torvalds to work as fellows at the foundation so that they can be neutral actors in a mass collaboration project like Linux. We manage the Linux trademark. We have a legal defense fund for the platform. We work with the USPTO (Patent and Trademark Office) on patent quality issues. And we do that work to improve the quality of software patents and protect the platform. And then finally, we work on the standardizing the Linux platform.

InfoWorld: What kind of legal protection does Linux require? And has anything ever come of the Microsoft protest that there's Linux code that they patented or something to that effect?

Zemlin: What they were talking about were patents that Microsoft holds in a range of areas. They didn't actually disclose what those were, but in general felt that they overlapped with other technology. No, nothing ever became of it because everybody holds patents on everything out there lately in software.

InfoWorld: You have a legal defense fund. Should people have legal concerns about using Linux?

Zemlin: Just like any other major software platform, there'll be patent trolls or opportunists who try to harm the platform. The SCO Group was a good example of that. In fact, the legal defense fund was created to assist in defense of the platform in the SCO lawsuit. And so that's a good example.

InfoWorld: What became of that?

Zemlin: SCO lost the lawsuit, it was found that there were no copyright infringements that were there in the Linux platform, and it was proven that Novell indeed owned the copyright to the software that SCO alleged was theirs. And SCO was de-listed from Nasdaq and is now in bankruptcy proceedings.

InfoWorld: Is there anything happening as far as using the GNU General Public license version 3 for Linux, or is that just not happening?

Zemlin: It's not happening today. In the future there may be, but I think it's unlikely at this point. Linus, who is fairly influential in the license decision, has publicly stated that he's not interested in GPL3 at this time.