News

FCODE suite 1.0.1 available (2006-09-21)

Once again, David Paktor, of the IBM Corporation, has contributed to the OpenBIOS FCODE suite. This release has higher test coverage, a more detailed report on one type of error, and removal of dead code and consolidation of some other code.

SUN released their OpenBOOT source code (2006-09-06)

SUN microsystems has recently released their OpenBOOT source code to the community under a BSD license. Go to their OpenSparc T1 website] to download the full archive (190MB) or check out our local mirror (1.7MB).

New FCODE suite available (2006-08-08)

David Paktor, of the IBM Corporation, has contributed some groundbreaking feature updates to the OpenBIOS FCODE utilities toke, detok and romheaders. Find details and binaries here

Sparc32 support in development (2006-05-05)

OpenBIOS has a port for 32bit Sparc CPUs now. The initially targeted milestone is to get a full firmware implementation for the QEMU project.

OpenBIOS switched to Subversion (2006-04-26)

See the development repository for more information.

Bugfix version of tokenizer toke (2005-10-15)

Version 0.6.10 of the OpenBIOS tokenizer toke has been released. This is a bugfix release.

New version of toke (2005-10-05)

Version 0.6.9 of the OpenBIOS tokenizer toke has been released. This is a bugfix release.

New versions of toke and detok (2005-03-10)

New versions of the OpenBIOS utilities have been released: The tokenizer toke 0.6.8 and the detokenizer detok 0.6.1.

Stallman calls for action on Free BIOS (2005-02-26)

FSF President Richard M. Stallman was calling for action on free BIOS in his speech at FOSDEM 2005. Read about The Free Software Foundation's Campaign for Free BIOS.

Portability and cross development (2005-01-12)

OpenBIOS is pushing towards new hardware platforms. Improvements in the cross compilation ability of OpenBIOS are currently merged into a seperate development tree. This will allow to develop and test OpenBIOS for ARM, PPC, AMD64 and others just using an ordinary PC.

OpenBIOS boots, part II (2004-08-01)

After some major cleanup, OpenBIOS now also boots on real PPC hardware: The Total Impact Briq.

Linux Tag (2004-06-27)

The OpenBIOS team went to the LinuxTag, hacking and chatting at the Forth e.V. booth. OpenBIOS can run forth files from a filesystem now and it has a preliminary PCI driver.

OpenBIOS boots (2004-05-23)

After many bugfixes OpenBIOS booted Linux on real hardware now (AMD64 and x86).

IDE support (2004-01-23)

Jens Axboe wrote an IDE driver for OpenBIOS. This will help OpenBIOS to boot on real hardware soon.

Device and Client Interface (2004-01-10)

OpenBIOS' interfaces for device and client (OS) interaction are basically finished. When used in MacOnLinux (MOL), OpenBIOS can boot MacOS and Linux.

Bitkeeper repository (2003-12-20)

Most of OpenBIOS moved to a bitkeeper repository. Check out bk://openbios.bkbits.net/unstable for the latest development tree.

Toke and Detok update (2003-11-29)

Toke and Detok, OpenBIOS' FCode toolchain, have been updated. Toke can now be used to directly create PCI Option ROMs with FCode. Both toke and detok got a couple of bugfixes and integrate cleanly in the OpenBIOS build process now.

OpenBIOS forth kernel 1.1 (2003-10-12)

After the first release here's an update with some fixes, optimized speed and a plugin system that allows easier development under a Linux/Unix system.

OpenBIOS forth kernel released (2003-09-16)

After some months of development we are happy to announce the new OpenBIOS forth kernel "BeginAgain".

New domain: openbios.org! (2003-08-23)

We got it! After many years of hazzling with a domain grabber we finally got the domain openbios.org.

dictionary dumping (2002-10-16)

OpenBIOS' forth kernel paflof knows how to dump dictionaries now. Read more information on how to use this feature in the mailing list archive.

LinuxFund.org (2002-07-04)

OpenBIOS is one out of three projects funded in LinuxFund.org's Spring Grant Cycle 2002. The Development Grant of $1000 will be used to advance the project.

toke and detok update (2002-05-26)

Toke 0.4 and detok 0.5.2 have been released. Detok has some new features, such as line numbers or byte offsets, proper checksum calculations, 64bit opcodes and several bug fixes. Toke comes with better error messages, working case...endcase constructs, improved number parsing, better IEEE compliance and less bugs.

toke 0.2 released (2002-03-20)

The new version of toke is quite an improvement compared to the last release. Most of the missing control words and tokenizer directives are supported now, string handling was improved, error messages and warnings contain line numbers etc. This component needs heavy testing.

toke 0.1 released (2002-03-04)

Time is passing by and the OpenBIOS project has a tokenizer now. Even though some things are yet missing, it is capable to tokenize quite a huge amount of test code fed into it.

detok 0.3 released (2002-02-26)

The IEEE-1275 FCode detokenizer got some cleanup. Dictionary is no more autogenerated, memory consumption reduced by almost 70%.

/dev/bios 0.3.2 released 2002-02-19 After having almost no releases in the last 2 years, /dev/bios shows up in version 0.3.2 now. It has support for NSC CS5530(A), AMD 7xx, ServerWorks, Intel 4x0/8xx and other chipsets. See the /dev/bios page for details.

new version of /dev/bios available 2002-02-15

The kernel level firmware flasher /dev/bios is under control of the OpenBIOS CVS now. /dev/bios now supports quite a big number of motherboard chipsets.

new version of feval released 2001-12-16

FCode evaluator feval-0.2.6 released. This is a bug fix release. Check the status page for more details.

Talk to us LIVE! 2001-12-03

Yesterday we moved from IRCNet to irc.freenode.net. You can talk with us at #OpenBIOS usually all the day (CET timezone)

new version of detok released 2001-12-02

FCode detokenizer detok-0.2.3 released. This version should compile on any ANSI C Compiler and has corrected FCode names. Check the status page for more details.

OpenBIOS is now under control of CVS 2001-11-12 The OpenBIOS development CVS is up and running.

new version of feval released 2001-11-08

FCode evaluator feval-0.2.5 released. This version has preliminary package support. Check the status page for more details.

new version of detok released 2001-10-15

FCode detokenizer detok-0.2.2 released. This version fixes indentation and a string allocation error.

new version of detok and feval released (2001-09-16)

Update: FCode evaluator feval-0.2 and detokenizer detok-0.2.1 available now.

we now have a detokenizer (2001-09-09)

There's a first version of an fcode detokenizer now. This is the first part of the OpenBIOS development suite.

general news on bios-coding (2000-02-13)

The LinuxBIOS Project replace the firmware of their Rockhopper cluster machines with a special Linux kernel image, and instead of running the BIOS on startup they run Linux. For information and patches, check out their homepage at http://www.linuxbios.org/.

older news are not available. please notify Stefan Reinauer if you are missing information in here.