According to a post over at Gmane.org, AMD engineer Yinghai Lu has reportedly released source-code of the BIOS for the Gigabyte Technology M57SLI-S4 motherboard. This can potentially allow advanced users to "program their motherboards" by themselves, customizing and optimizing the BIOS to their personal needs, possibly even opening up more functionality for overclocking. The M57SLI-S4 mainboard is based on Nvidia nForce 570 SLI core-logic, supports various AMD processors in the AM2 form-factor, has four slots for DDR2 memory, has two PCI Express x16 slots for SLI mode, three PCI Express x1 ports for add-in cards, six Serial ATA-300 connectors for hard disk drives with RAID support, ten USB 2.0 connectors, three IEEE1394a (FireWire) ports and so on.
LinuxBIOS is a free software project started in 1999 and endorsed by the Free Software Foundation; the project aims to replace the proprietary BIOS firmware found in most computers with a lightweight BIOS designed to perform only the minimum of tasks necessary. "The need for a Free BIOS is even more pressing since DRM and Treacherous Computing have found their way into some proprietary BIOSes and EFI. From a practical perspective, LinuxBIOS removes the need for ugly hacks and workarounds in the kernel that compensate for buggy BIOSes we can now fix the BIOS ourselves," a statement proclaims.