coreboot (aka LinuxBIOS): The Free/Open-Source x86 Firmware

Google Tech Talks
October 30, 2008

ABSTRACT

Coreboot, formerly known as LinuxBIOS, was originally started in 1999 to complement LOBOS [2] (Linux OS Boots OS) as part of an effort to move away from inscrutible and inflexible proprietary BIOS firmware used in clusters at high-security government research labs. However, coreboot took on a life of its own and quickly overcame many obstacles thanks to the help of a friendly and knowledgable open source community. This talk will give an overview of coreboot, what it is capable of, what it is incapable of, and what makes it different from the traditional PC BIOS and EFI. We'll focus on developments in version 3 which cleans up the development model substantially, has much improved ACPI and SMI support, usage of the Linux kernel build system to build coreboot, new ways to boot locally and over a network, do some demos, and more!

Speaker: Ronald G. Minnich
Ron Minnich founded the LinuxBIOS project (which is now Coreboot) when he joined the Cluster Research Team at Los Alamos Nat'l Lab in 1999. He has been working in HPC for much longer than he ever expected to, which explains the grey hairs in his beard. He has built software and HPC systems based on FPGAs, PIMs, distributed computers (co-authoring a famous C song: "I was Grid before Grid was cool"), and clusters. He has been working with Unix innards longer than some of his co-workers have been alive, which fact causes him to wonder if he should get in another line of work.

Ron is also a contributor to Linux (v9fs), Plan 9, has written articles for numerous publications (DDJ, Linux Journal, etc) and has authored and co-authored over 20 papers [4] covering everything from distributed computing, shared memory models, firmware (Coreboot), large-scale fault tolerant computing, and much more.

[4] portal.acm.org/author_page.cfm?id=81100104582=15151515=6184618

Speaker: Stefan Reinauer
Stefan Reinauer was a very early contributor to the project during his time as system architect as SuSE and was also the lead developer of OpenBIOS, the free/open-source Open Firmware implementation.

Stefan eventually founded Coresystems GmbH which focused on providing firmware solutions centered around Open Firmware and Coreboot and has since assumed stewardship of the project.

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[dhendrix666]

Of course, and Coreboot is independent of Linux. It essentially is the hardware initialization that Linux cannot handle on its own.

You can strip all that extra stuff out of your payload (or kernel, as the case might be). As Ron noted, when you *do* need something such as a special network or storage driver, it's there. You get to choose what you want, and omit what you don't want. This is the beauty of the system.

[Membrane556]

Sounds like a good idea and superior to EFI and OF I hope it catches on.

[MrMassivemanmeat]

I'm 42,001.

[ikemkrueger]

What about a config GUI?

[razor1394a]

Please we need this for all possible kinds of motherboards because it boots so quickly and it works so much better. BIOS is garbage.

[Arakash]

i really hope Coreboot gets supported more. The latest power regression has showed how outdated the BIOS idea is.

[lesleyhenriquez]

@Ribulose15diphosphat True bios is a hackjob if there ever was one, at least the newer ones. That system is old and deprecated. EFI or CoreBoot, we need to move on.

And no-kernel has been tried and found unworkable. You can look at things like Mach-kernels, seems like it would be for you.

[moveaxebx]

AMD now supports CoreBoot. Congrats to the team!

[Ribulose15diphosphat]

Never Channge a running system ! A true IBM-PC need true BIOS and true DOS. Everything would be so much better if Linux, Windows,protected mode,USB,PCI,CDs,mouses,GUIs,a­cces rights and all the other poser stuff would never have been introduced. In a true System where is no kernel and all TSRs are like comrades, what have acces to everything. And Drivers shall be written in ASM ! It's Lunacy to use C for a BIOS, OS,or a Driver. There have all the true Programmers gone ? Maybe Valhalla ?

[TheMeanEYE]

Fist 10 minutes or so he really ran over slides.