telos is pleased to announce the first public release of the new Linux boot loader called “alios”, available under the terms of the GNU General Public License. alios has been designed to completely eliminate the need for a BIOS and to load the Linux kernel image from solid state memory such as Flash ROM. Optionally, a RAM disk image may be loaded from ROM then as well.

Being specifically developed for systems based on the Elan SC400 x86 microcontroller from Advanced Micro Devices Inc., it allows the developer to build embedded devices with as few components as only the SC400 CPU and some ROM/DRAM memory. By eliminating the need for a BIOS it also relieves the embedded system vendor of BIOS manufacturer license fees.

A BIOS-less system became possible only because the Linux OS itself, once bootstrapped, does not make use of BIOS calls any more. It has all the low level hardware drivers itself. The very few initialisations actually required in a small system when starting up, e.g. DRAM detection and configuration, are made by alios itself. Because the source code is available, every developer using alios is able to add specific enhancements just as needed.

The concept of alios may be used with other microprocessors, also. telos will gladly assist in such projects. We have set up a homepage for “alios”, where you can find more information about “alios” and where you can download the whole source code and a binary evaluation package.

Information about telos GmbH is available here. telos may also be contacted via email.

 
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