SeaBIOS

SeaBIOS (formerly known as "legacybios") is an open source implementation of a 16-bit x86 BIOS. SeaBIOS can run in an emulator or it can run natively on x86 hardware with the use of coreboot.

SeaBIOS is the default BIOS for the QEMU and KVM virtual machines. Can be used with the Bochs emulator.

SeaBIOS has been tested with the GNU GRUB, LILO, and SYSLINUX bootloaders. It has been tested with Microsoft Windows, Linux, FreeDOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD.

Features

• Graphical bootsplash screen (JPEG and BMP).
• USB keyboard and mouse support.
• USB drive booting support.
• Support for 32-bit PCI BIOS calls.
• ATA DMA and bus mastering support.
• AHCI controllers support.
• Support USB UHCI, OHCI and EHCI host controller interfaces.
• Support systems with multiple VGA cards.
• Boot menu that allow booting from any drive or any CD-ROM.
• BIOS Boot Specification (BBS) calls.
• Rebooting on Control-Alt-Delete key press.
• Dynamic e820 map generation.
• Logical block addressing (LBA) 48-bit.
• POST Memory Manager (PMM).
• Paravirtualization, Xen HVM, Virtio
• Payloads (LZMA compressed)
• VESA BIOS Extensions (VBE)

External links

• Official website
• http://www.coreboot.org/SeaBIOS
• http://code.coreboot.org/p/seabios/