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SeaBIOS

Open-source implementation of x86 BIOS

Field	Value
name	SeaBIOS
title	SeaBIOS
logo
screenshot	SeaBIOS 1.15.0 boot device selection screenshot.png
screenshot size	220px
caption	SeaBIOS is the default BIOS for QEMU
developer	Kevin O'Connor
released
latest release version	1.17.0{{cite web
url	https://www.seabios.org/Releases#SeaBIOS_1.17.0
title	Releases - SeaBIOS
website	www.seabios.org
access-date	20 July 2025}}
latest release date
latest preview date
programming language	C
platform	x86
included with	KVM, QEMU
standard	SMBIOS
language	English
genre	BIOS
license	LGPLv3
website

| access-date=20 July 2025}}

SeaBIOS is an open-source implementation of an x86 BIOS, serving as a freely available firmware for x86 systems. Aiming for compatibility, it supports standard BIOS features and calling interfaces that are implemented by a typical proprietary x86 BIOS. SeaBIOS can either run on bare hardware as a coreboot payload, or can be used directly in emulators such as QEMU and Bochs.

Initially, SeaBIOS was based on the open-source BIOS implementation included with the Bochs emulator. The project was created with intentions to allow native usage on x86 hardware, and to be based on an improved and more easily extendable internal source code implementation.{{cite web

Features

Features supported by SeaBIOS include the following:

Graphical bootsplash screen (JPEG and BMP)
USB keyboard and mouse support
USB Mass Storage boot support
USB Attached SCSI boot support
ATA support
AHCI support
NVMe support
El Torito optical disc drive boot support
BIOS Boot Specification (BBS)
Rebooting on Control-Alt-Delete key press
Network booting support e.g. iPXE or gPXE
Logical block addressing (LBA)
POST Memory Manager (PMM)
Paravirtualization, Xen HVM, VirtIO
Coreboot Payloads (LZMA compressed)
PCI Firmware Specification
SeaBIOS as a Compatibility Support Module (CSM) for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) and Open Virtual Machine Firmware (OVMF)
Virtual machine host notification of paravirtualized guests which panic via the pvpanic driver
Trusted Platform Module
Enhanced Disk Drive (EDD) (INT 13H extensions)
e820 memory map
Protected mode interfaces, e.g. APM, Legacy PnP, DMI, MPS, SMBIOS, VBE, and ACPI
System Management Mode

A patch exists to load the SLIC table from a licensed OEM Windows BIOS.

It does not support ESCD. SeaBIOS does not support either Intel ME or AMD PSP or their modules.

SeaBIOS's boot device selection menu can be accessed by pressing during the boot process.

Uses

SeaBIOS can run natively on x86 hardware, in which case it is usually loaded as a coreboot payload; it can run on 386 and newer processors, and requires a minimum of 1 MB of RAM. SeaBIOS also runs inside an emulator; it is the default BIOS for the QEMU and KVM virtualization environments, and can be used with the Bochs emulator. It is also included in some Chromebooks, although it is not used by ChromeOS.

Development

Most of the SeaBIOS source code is written in C, with its build system relying on the standard GNU toolchain. SeaBIOS has been tested with various bootloaders and operating systems, including GNU GRUB, LILO, SYSLINUX, Microsoft Windows, Linux, FreeDOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD.

References

"ghuntley/seaslic GitHub". Github.com.
(2013-02-26). "3 alternatives to Chrome OS on Google's Chromebook Pixel — Tech News and Analysis". Gigaom.com.
"SeaBIOS - coreboot".
"Grub2 Other Os - Community Help Wiki".

Info: Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

2008-software free-bios-implementations free-software-programmed-in-c open-source-firmware

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