Thanks to the AMD engineer Yinghai Lu, the GIGABYTE M57SLI-S4 is the first-ever desktop motherboard supported by LinuxBIOS. This will enable users that are in search for a completely Free and Open Source computer to have full control over their hardware. And now that DRM and Treacherous Computing have found a way into some proprietary BIOSes and EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface), the need of a Free BIOS is more pressing.

This GIGABYTE M57SLI-S4 motherboard is based on the NVIDIA nForce 570 SLI chipset and AMD's latest Socket AM2. Here are some features of this motherboard:

￭ AMD Athlon 64 X2/ Athlon 64 socket AM2 platform
￭ Supports high performance Dual Channel DDR2 800 RAM for up to 16 GB of memory
￭ NVIDIA SLI Multi-GPU function for extreme graphics performance
￭ Integrated NVIDIA SATA 3Gb/s with RAID function
￭ Optimized Gigabit LAN connection with NVIDIA TCP/IP Acceleration technology
￭ Integrated T.I. IEEE1394 FireWire interface
￭ Features 8 channel High Definition Audio
￭ RoHS compliant motherboard for green computing

The GIGABYTE M57SLI-S4 motherboard can be obtained today from many retail and online stores.

About LinuxBIOS

LinuxBIOS is a Free Software project aimed at replacing the proprietary BIOS (firmware) you can find in most of today's computers.

It performs just a little bit of hardware initialization and then executes a so-called payload, for example a Linux kernel, FILO, GRUB2, OpenBIOS, Open Firmware, SmartFirmware, GNUFI (UEFI), Etherboot, ADLO (for booting Windows 2000 and OpenBSD), Plan 9, or Memtest86.

LinuxBIOS removes the need for ugly hacks and workarounds in the kernel that compensate for buggy BIOSes, which means we can now fix the BIOS ourselves. Here are some highlights of LinuxBIOS:

￭ 100% Free Software (GPL), no royalties, no license fees!
￭ Fast boot times (3 seconds from power-on to Linux console)
￭ Avoids the need for a slow, buggy, proprietary BIOS
￭ Runs in 32-Bit protected mode almost from the start
￭ Written in C, contains virtually no assembly code
￭ Supports a wide variety of hardware and payloads
￭ Further features: netboot, serial console, remote flashing...

LinuxBIOS can be used in a wide range of products, like:

￭ Standard desktop computers and servers
￭ Clusters, high-performance computing
￭ Embedded solutions, appliances, terminals
￭ Small form factor computers, Home-theater PCs (HTPC)
￭ No-moving-parts solutions (except for CPU fan & power supply)
￭ Various non-standard scenarios (e.g. FPGA in Opteron socket)
￭ One Laptop per Child (OLPC)

You can download the latest LinuxBIOS source code now from Softpedia.