Coreboot Is Set To Start Booting Laptops

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Coreboot Is Set To Start Booting Laptops

This weekend in Brussels at FOSDEM along with many interesting X.Org discussions and laying out the plans for Wayland 1.0, the Coreboot project has an exciting announcement: showing off the first mainstream laptop with Coreboot support...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTA1MjM

[Drago]

Michael, please, please, please, let there be high quality audio on this talk + slides.

[cl333r]

I wonder if companies (like Microsoft) can strangle this effort with patents and/or with suggestions that it somehow encourages piracy of their OS, afaik MS is interested in UEFI which excludes other OSes (for now on ARM). I might be wrong but you probably get the basic idea.

[Drago]

I wonder if companies (like Microsoft) can strangle this effort with patents and/or with suggestions that it somehow encourages piracy of their OS, afaik MS is interested in UEFI which excludes other OSes (for now on ARM). I might be wrong but you probably get the basic idea.

Software patents are used only in couple of countries in the world, for now....

[cl333r]

Software patents are used only in couple of countries in the world, for now....

Yes, but among them is the USA which under the hood twists the arms of the other countries (EU etc) to adopt such crap as well, not to mention that loosing such markets is often a deal breaker for various reasons.

[droidhacker]

I've pretty much lost all interest in coreboot. They basically are a bunch of promises and half-completed code. Nice that things "boot" on it, but if you can only use 1 stick of RAM and the SATA ports don't work, what's the point? Coreboot is going nowhere... and slowly.

[diriel]

After having watched the UEFI for Linux videos, I sincerely hope Coreboot can catch some traction!

[Ferdinand]

What we need is a standard that motherboard makers can easily follow. Then you give certification to motherboards that abide by that standard. This would make it easy for coreboot to support it. And this will make it easy for consumers to chose motherboards that are easily supportable. On top of that you could make it attractive for motherboard makers to use coreboot. If you offer features that are in high demand but only available on coreboot motherboards you would get a strong following from the geeks. After that maybe OEMs might want some of those cool features in their computers...

[Xake]

What we need is a standard that motherboard makers can easily follow.

Standards are already there, the problem is that no vendor takes the time to adhere to the standard. Their standard test is "does it boot windows?" and not "does it follow the hardware-makers recommendations?". So that is why you might find many many BIOSes that gets strange messages from Linux (if I for example enable VirtDirectIO in BIOS my linux finds all kinds of funnyness wrt IOMMU). And that is also why this gem appeared: http://biosbits.org/

[Kivada]

I've pretty much lost all interest in coreboot. They basically are a bunch of promises and half-completed code. Nice that things "boot" on it, but if you can only use 1 stick of RAM and the SATA ports don't work, what's the point? Coreboot is going nowhere... and slowly.

So I take it you know nothing about what Microsoft is forcing upon all OEMs for Windows 8 certification? It's called SecureBoot http://www.osnews.com/search?q=secure+boot It doesn't just affect X86 hardware as they are also making it a requirement for the ARM versions of Win8 for phones and tablets. It'll make using anything other then Windows 8+ on newer hardware very much a PITA at best and impossible at worst.