Google Continues Working A Lot On Coreboot

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Google Continues Working A Lot On Coreboot

Last year I wrote about Google becoming more involved with the Coreboot project for an open-source BIOS replacement for many motherboards/laptops. Google has been very interested in Coreboot since for their Chrome OS on the OEM Chromebooks they can achieve "super fast boot times" while being stable, secure, and can be quite customized with the open-source project. Google continues to invest heavily into the upstream Coreboot project...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTI3ODA

[zanny]

I would kill for Coreboot to murder EFI and classic bios, but the project still doesn't support decade old hardware, and I don't think it can ever be successful unless / AMD / Intel / mobile board manufacturers start publishing documentation on their boards and chips to support the project. You still can't run any core iX series chipsets on coreboot. AMD is only marginally better.

[89c51]

I would kill for Coreboot to murder EFI and classic bios, but the project still doesn't support decade old hardware, and I don't think it can ever be successful unless / AMD / Intel / mobile board manufacturers start publishing documentation on their boards and chips to support the project. You still can't run any core iX series chipsets on coreboot. AMD is only marginally better.

You can have EFI with coreboot. And i think you can also have some sort of OG bios. Also unless manufacturers put it on a mobo you are out of luck. Google controls the HW thats why they use it. On modern general purpose HW there is not even a chance in running it.



And yes i am one of the first people that would like the kernel that is provided by my distro of choice to be a direct payload for Coreboot.

[GreatEmerald]

Same thing here. I would very much like to have Coreboot on my machine, since the original UEFI implementation is so buggy that it even causes Windows to BSoD on install, but of course the board is not supported by Coreboot, and I can't risk trying it. Only hope now is that the original manufacturers fix these problems...

[Kivada]

You can have EFI with coreboot. And i think you can also have some sort of OG bios. Also unless manufacturers put it on a mobo you are out of luck. Google controls the HW thats why they use it. On modern general purpose HW there is not even a chance in running it.



And yes i am one of the first people that would like the kernel that is provided by my distro of choice to be a direct payload for Coreboot.

You can run Coreboot on off the shelf hardware, but that hardware has to be in the compatibility list. http://www.coreboot.org/Supported_Motherboards

[efikkan]

I really hope Coreboot arrives for some new Intel hardware, for both socket 2011 and some decent laptops.

[d4ddi0]

What I think most people don't get (I didn't until I followed the corboot mailing list for a few months) is that there are two levels of "support" in coreboot. Support for particular generic pieces of hardware, and then support for the particular register settings to configure superio chips (some even have some embedded flash that needs to be dumped and disassembled to figure out what is is doing), enable or disable registers, etc. The second set of things are unique to each motherboard (or at best a small series of substantially similar motherboards from the same mfr).

There will never be a magical point where new mother boards are covered by coreboot by virtue of using only covered hardware.
Each board has to be individually ported.
Only if mfrs find it better (or cheaper) to support coreboot than to pay American Megatrends (or whatever they are called these days) to write them a bios for their hardware.

The embedded world is actually in much better shape in this regard.

[Adarion]

I have seen Coreboot running and I am pondering to load it on several boxes here - as soon as I get some exhange BIOS chips flashed with the original BIOS. Just in case.
It's sad to read that some mainboard people still provide buggy firmware be it classic BIOS, EFI and stuff. Bad ACPI implementations and defective by design "secure boot". Anyway, Coreboot has a long way behind and there is still way to go. I think we'll need some patience here until coreboot, flashrom and potential payloads like SeaBIOS work everywhere.

[Kano]

I would really like to test coreboot with tianocore with secure boot...

[JanC]

I would really like to test coreboot with tianocore with secure boot...

AFAIK you can do that on qemu?