Linux.com: LinuxBIOS Ready to Go Mainstream

“After seven years of work, the LinuxBIOS project is on the
brink of making a free BIOS a standard option for computers.
Serious obstacles remain, including a lack of resources and
resistance from some proprietary chipset manufacturers and OEMs,
but the advantages of LinuxBIOS indicate that its availability to
the average computer buyer may be only months away.

“LinuxBIOS is intended to provide a philosophically free
replacement for proprietary firmware in chipsets. It consists of
the minimal amount of code needed to start a mainboard to the point
at which a payload–an executable capable of starting a kernel,
such as Etherboot–can finish booting the machine. As the name
implies, work to date has focused on using a Linux kernel, but the
same technology could be used to start a machine with Windows or
the GRUB boot manager…”

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