I have often wondered what it would take to get Linux PCs to boot faster! After reading this article below, I now know that it comes down to custom BIOS.

Building a Linux system that will boot in seconds, not minutes, requires a custom BIOS. But thanks to a new compiler and development process, we can build a BIOS for a new motherboard with only C code-no assembly.

In this article, we describe the work done by the Cluster Research Team at Los Alamos National Laboratory to port LinuxBIOS to the AMD SC520 CPU. Although space does not permit a detailed description of all the work involved, we hope you can get some idea of what it takes to port to a new board.

The AMD SC520 is a small, low-power, integrated CPU. It is used in many embedded applications, one of the more interesting being the Portland Aerospace Society’s open-source rocket. This rocket uses a standard board from Kontron to control all onboard computing functions. The board features a number of nice control buses, including the CAN bus for power control of rocket subsystems.

We were asked whether we could port LinuxBIOS to the board the rocket team uses. We purchased the board they use and found one main problem: the BIOS Flash is soldered on. If you burn a bad BIOS, the board is now a nice paperweight. It might be nice to have a fancy burned-out board as a paperweight, but we would rather have working boards. [Read the rest]