Google Adds Coreboot Support For "Butterfly"

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Google Adds Coreboot Support For "Butterfly"

Google continues to show commitment to supporting Coreboot as a viable alternative to traditional BIOS / UEFI. The latest work that comes via the Googleplex is support for the "Butterfly", or known to the masses as the HP Pavilion Chromebook...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTI5OTQ

[Adarion]

That sounds like it could be really good news.

Just read some days ago (in a news about the bricked Samsungs with UEFI, works also with Windows now!) that UEFI reference implem. is 35 Megs! WTF! Something that old BIOS and coreboot do with some Kilobytes, which has to run on CPU registers before memory is available... and intel makes it a 35 M. I so hope that UEFI dies a quick death. Besides with UEFI came Secure Boot and that also has to die asap.

[Vash63]

I have a UEFI BIOS on my Asus Rampage and love it. Asus makes it very easy to get a full EFI boot without requiring Secure Boot or any signed keys, and by default supports BIOS boot for users who are not comfortable messing with settings.

UEFI isn't the problem - Microsoft's preferred implementation of Secure Boot is. My system with UEFI boots in a small fraction of the time that any BIOS-based system does. I have it boot straight to the Linux kernel through efibootmgr without needing a bootloader of any kind and have the system up at the KDM login in less than 10 seconds from hitting the power button - sometimes before my monitor even wakes up! 35MB is still absolutely tiny considering it's coming off of flash memory with modern hardware.

If there's something we should be protesting to manufacturers, it's disabling Secure Boot by default or making it extremely easy for new users to do so - not killing UEFI entirely.