BIOS Today: A Pain In Sensitive Parts Of Anatomy

• Clusters (started at Cluster Research Lab, Advanced Computing Lab, LANL)

  • Nodes depend on vendor-supplied BIOS for booting
  • BIOS normally relies on inherently unreliable legacy devices (floppy, HD) to boot the OS
  • BIOS cannot deal with non-standard, experimental hardware Need full control of the boot process, to the point that jobs in the queue might indicate which kernel to run, where to find root FS, etc.

• Maintenance is a nightmare

  • BIOSes are buggy and cannot be fixed (by user)
  • The development toolchain is highly specialized (read: obsolete), difficult to come by, can be quite expensive
  • Try wandering around a few hundred node cluster with a monitor and a keyboard to change one BIOS setting

• Get rid of the legacy BIOS altogether!