Alios

The alios boot loader for Linux is a small assembler loader code designed to load a Linux kernel and RAM disk image from ROM after initialising the most basic hardware features. The current version is configured to initialise the registers of an AMD Elan SC400 microcontroller and start Linux on it, with control via serial console.

The goal when writing alios was to eliminate the need for a BIOS on small embedded systems where the hardware setup is quite fixed. The Linux OS itself on such systems does not depend on the presence of a BIOS - once it is loaded, all the low-level access to hardware is performed by the Linux kernel itself.

You can download the latest version of alios as source code package from our download page.

To make testing of alios as simple as possible we offer a evaluation package, which includes all necessary images (alios, kernel, initrd).

• AMD Elan SC400 system (with at least 8 Mbyte RAM)
• Linear flash or SRAM (at least 2 Mbytes) onboard or as a PCMCIA card

If you find a bug, be sure to send a report.

• What does "alios" stand for? The name is a mélange of "Another Linux OS Bootloader" and "BIOS".
• Are there any plans to support other embedded CPUs of AMD like the SC520 in future? At the moment there are no concrete plans. For our customers we could implement such a port as part of a project. On customer's demand this port could be released under the terms of the GPL, too (sponsoring).

This software is subject to the GNU License.