Coreboot + Seabios vs Award Bios

Boot time comparison between coreboot and the factory Award bios

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• boot
• time
• seabios
• coreboot
• bios
• post

[Jonpro03]

AMD announced full support for Coreboot! This is monumental for the coreboot guys! Congrats!

[yoshi314]

btw what hardware did you test it on in the video?

[Jonpro03]

@yoshi314 The board in the video is an ECS P6IWP-Fe that I snatched out of a gaming system at a local bar.

[Frap357]

Great if you're running clusters or embedded devices.

But not good for a desktop/laptop PC.

Cant monitor CPU temperature or fan speeds.

Cant overclock.

Cant disable USB, FireWire, on-board audio/LAN, COM/LPT ports.

Cant use TPM / trusted computing.

You cant even to the most basic thing such as changing boot order.

Forget about "Press F2 to flash". It wont even show CPU & RAM at POST.

[Jonpro03]

@Frap357 Yes, Coreboot is not intended for end-user PCs. It's intended use is embedded system boards and server boards. This is why it was so interesting for my car pc build. There are a lot of options available like you describe (overclock support is still a WIP) that are selections when compiling the bios but cannot be changed without recompiling. There is however a prompt to choose boot device.

[Frap357]

@Jonpro03 re-compile and re-flash just to change a simple little setting is a pain-in-the-ass.

I think it should have a setup screen.

[Jonpro03]

@Frap357 Hahaha, I can't disagree there. That's the job of the payload. After Coreboot finishes initializing hardware (sometimes as quickly as 500ms) it hands off to whatever payload you choose when compiling. In this case I'm using Seabios. Other payloads you can use include OpenFirmware, OpenBios, Grub, Filo and of course a Linux Kernel among others. I'm sure it's possible to use a much more bloated BIOS setup as a Payload, but that defeats the purpose of Coreboot.

[Frap357]

@Jonpro03 defeats the purpose?

I want an free open source BIOS.

Proprietary software/firmware does not belong in a computer!

[iiiears]

Someone suggested a handle for ROMs. Cut the point off a push pin and glue it on. Different colors different loads.

[RorraStone]

Whoops, I mean "it's", not "they're".

[RorraStone]

I am interested in using Coreboot at some point in the future (after I eventually make a switch to a Linux distro) but I want to wait until they're more developed. At this point, my computer isn't even supported, at least that's the vibe I get when I checked the supported boards on the main page for Coreboot. My motherboard is a Phoenix Award Bios.

[fighterpiolt1992]

how the hell do you install it

[fighterpiolt1992]

i want to get this on all of my computers

[Fridelain]

@Jonpro03 Depends of what the purpose is to you. Some people want a fast boot, other a computer running only free software, other new features in hardware that the vendor no longer supports (Support for newer processors or in my case hard disks larger than 32GB.) Most people will want a combination of these.

[cheergirl99999994]

11 secs coreboot instead of 35 secs award bios for this video :)