Coreboot Now Works On A ~$70 Intel Motherboard

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Coreboot Now Works On A ~$70 Intel Motherboard

Coreboot has been ported to work on another Intel motherboard. This new support target is for older Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge processors but the motherboard can still be purchased via retail channels and sells for only about $70 USD...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTg1MTM

[mark45]

I just bought Asus H81M-A which runs on UEFI, I tried it out and I like it a lot - everything including the GUI works and looks way better than in BIOS motherboards. Before buying this MB I used to fear and hate UEFI.

Given this, I wonder how hard is Google trying to push Coreboot and where does it see Coreboot in the midterm? Do they really think they can grow its market share and keep it a close competitor to UEFI or even win in the longer term?

[zanny]

Do they really think they can grow its market share and keep it a close competitor to UEFI or even win in the longer term?

It does not compete with UEFI, you can run Tianocore on top of Coreboot and have an EFI environment. It competes with the obfuscated spaghetti code controlling the hardware below that that goes unnamed because its a black box.

And unless consumers gave a shit about how their motherboards came with proprietary black boxes running every time they turn it on, controlling the most fundamental parts of the system in an inaudible, irreparable state, then there is no market pressure to change on mainboard manufacturers.

Google is only growing coreboots market share with Chromebooks, and even then they ship crippled binary firmware versions of coreboot that completely defeat the original intent of open firmware. They are not looking to make it an efi competitor, they just probably didn't want to deal with the bullshit disparity of firmware quality of the in house black box firmware hacks everyone is still using with some sparkly EFI gui on top.

[mj13]

You would have thought that with the whole Snowden leaks that people would care. The BIOS is the best place to put a back door. It would make it OS independent.

[GreatEmerald]

Woah, that's pretty awesome. This motherboard is quite similar to my MSI B75A-G43 (MS-7758).

[Sonadow]

I just bought Asus H81M-A which runs on UEFI, I tried it out and I like it a lot - everything including the GUI works and looks way better than in BIOS motherboards. Before buying this MB I used to fear and hate UEFI.

Given this, I wonder how hard is Google trying to push Coreboot and where does it see Coreboot in the midterm? Do they really think they can grow its market share and keep it a close competitor to UEFI or even win in the longer term?

EFI is awesome. Support for >2TB boot disks alone is a good enough incentive to get rid of the legacy BIOS. The only thing I hate fighting with is Secure Boot. I want it enabled by default, but from what i read, signing my own kernels and enrolling my self-signed keys into the SB database is a major pain in the arse. And i don't want to use the pre-loaded Shim found in OpenSUSE and Fedora.

Coreboot isn't even close to hoping to compete with BIOS, let alone EFI.

[Delgarde]

You would have thought that with the whole Snowden leaks that people would care.

You over-estimate how much people care about the Snowden thing. It made a big impact on people who were already inclined to care about such things, and no impact whatsoever on everyone else.

[GreatEmerald]

Coreboot isn't even close to hoping to compete with BIOS, let alone EFI.

Coreboot beats BIOS and UEFI by a long shot. The technical basis for Coreboot is much better. UEFI is "everything and the kitchen sink, let's boot an entire different OS while booting because people love waiting". Coreboot meanwhile is "minimum hardware is up? Pass control, NOW!" And the latter is a much more sound idea. Why would you ever boot an OS whose only reason for existing is to boot another OS, instead of just booting the other OS? If you need multiboot, you can use GRUB as a payload directly. If not, just boot Linux directly without waiting at all. Which can result in 3-second boots, and that's from pressing the button to the desktop appearing. Impossible with UEFI.

[zanny]

Coreboot isn't even close to hoping to compete with BIOS, let alone EFI.

Nothing about Coreboot has anything to do with classical conceptions of BIOS or EFI. You can run Seabios or Tianocore on top of coreboot and have a bios or uefi environment. Or if you are a motherboard manufacturer you can ship coreboot + propriety shitty colorful UEFI environment.

Coreboot replaces the black box code buried so deep inside efi and bios implementations that you do not have an explicit name for it. It has nothing to do with your preboot environment of choice - you can use whatever you want.

As a result, Coreboot does not compete with uefi or bios at all - all it is is pressure on motherboard and chipset creators to provide documentation or contribute support to boot their motherboards with fully audit-able code to do the most primitive of things - the things most vulnerable - like initializing your ram or your cpu cache or your pci bus or your south bridge. It is never coreboot vs bios / efi - it is coreboot vs proprietary firmware, you can use whatever you want on top of that.

[pal666]

will coreboot support one non-obsolete motherboard someday ?