Associate reports, that Gigabyte M57SLI-S4 (chipsets NVIDIA nForce 570 SLI), became the first product, which supports LinuxBIOS.
The latter is developed for motherboard within the project for the creation of free software, approved free software foundation. The purpose of project is the replacement of current BIOS, utilized by the majority of computers, by the light BIOS, intended exclusively for contemporary 32-bit operating systems. The project linuxBIOS was begun in the winter 1999 in advanced computing laboratory in Los Alamos (see Los Alamos national laboratory). The results of project work are extended on the conditions GNU GPL.
The typical task Of linuxBIOS is to load of core linux, and in addition to this, LinuxBIOS can load and start the usable files format ELF, for example, etherboot, which is capable to load Linux network Ethernet, or ADLO, which loads Microsoft Windows 2000/XP.
The unique special feature Of linuxBIOS is the fact that the version linuxBIOS for x86 begins to work in the 32-bit regime after the fulfillment of only sixteen instructions processor, while typical for platform x86 bios work exclusively in 16- bit regime. Work in 32-bit regime makes the load of LinuxBIOS very rapid (at present the record of cold start from LinuxBIOS is approximately 3 seconds).
It is asserted that the use Of linuxBIOS will allow to facilitate the expansibility of system.
However, the hardware characteristics of this motherboard are the following:
- Supported processors: AMD socket AM2
- 2 X PCI express x16 (in regime x8), 3 X PCI express x1, 2 X PCI
- 6 X SATAII, RAID 0,1, 10
- 10 X USB 2.0
- 3 X fireWire
- Sound codec: Realtek ALC883
To Download LinuxBIOS for Gigabyte M57SLI-S4 is possible from home page of project linuxBIOS.