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LinuxBIOS is a nice theory, but it will never work consistently across all computer systems... like people try to do with pushing Linux itself. It just really seems like open-source zealotry gone awry.

There are too many motherboard and chip-set manufacturers to account for all the minute, yet critical, differences between them all. Multiply such a daunting task by the number of independent laptop manufacturers and it becomes a real nightmare.

What's more, you have the EFI initiative that will probably phase out the legacy BIOS.

Long story short, I can come up with many reasons why you'd want to leave the BIOS alone. You should need only one, the fact that flashing your BIOS with some homebrew stuff is not easy (got an E/EPROM burner???) nor recommended with a motherboard that you intend to keep working.

Most likely.

Most modern operating systems use as little BIOS as possible, just enough to get things started and then let real drivers handle things.

Good luck ;)

What happens when you burn a BIOS image and things don't turn out the way you expected? Exactly ;)

Ah, now we are digging into my past...Back when I worked for a now defunct company one of the major jobs was to not only Rev Eng. BIOS and then write the needed BIOS Patch code (for the purpose of resolving issues with particular BIOS's running our processor upgrades) but also to figure out exactly how to allow these patches to become field flashable (meaning you had to Rev. Eng the flash program and in-order-to figure out the needed magic to flash the BIOS while on the MB).

The best approach, when performing such actions, is to first make a copy of the BIOS (we used an E/Eprom burner) in its original format and then we started to play (we used a hardware ICE to make the first rev of patches and when the code was the way we wanted it we would apply the code fix to a binary image of the BIOS).  Next we would flash a spare E/Eprom with the BIOS code (making sure not to use the original) and give it a good workout.  Finally we would turn our attention to the the flashing software (which also required heavy use of all chipset docs) to figure out exactly what it was doing to enable the BIOS to be flashed (several of the flash loaders would make calls into SMM to toggle some bits).  Once that was all taken care of we would write our own flash loader and be done with it.

Them were the days!!!  While the company was a major POS  this job is the one that I enjoyed the most.

Just on a side note, SpooK is correct on the fact that there are so many little differences with chipsets and motherboards that this BIOS stuff is a never ending battle and you will find that a fix for one MB will not work for another MB (which you thought was exactly the same but is not as it may have one or two different chips on it for various things) and thusly the work it takes to create and maintain a library of BIOS patches will quickly out way any benefit!

You would be very surprised to find out how many times such satire turned out to be the actual case!