TikTok Owner Bytedance Goes Big On Open-Source Firmware

TikTok owner Bytedance this week hosted their CloudFW Open System Firmware Symposium in Beijing where they celebrated the launch of CloudFW 2.0 as they implement Coreboot to replace UEFI.

Bytedance is promoting CloudFW 2.0 as "the first firmware solution in the industry to productize the full stack Open System Firmware on x86 servers." This symposium was hosted in part by Intel.

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Christian Walter of 9elements Security was in attendance at the event and shared a few pictures.

Absolutely fabulous, well done!

And TIL that @Arm is evaluating the @coreboot_org + @LinuxBootOrg stack for LBBR v2. :-) pic.twitter.com/AkIRMVdi1Q

— Daniel Maslowski aka CyReVolt 🐢 (@OrangeCMS) March 7, 2023

The Coreboot crew also shared with Phoronix some additional pictures from the event:

It's very interesting to see their promotion of open-source firmware and how with CloudFW are leveraging Coreboot and seeing the advantages of it over proprietary BIOS/firmware or other less active projects.

With their open-source firmware stack they haven't had to compromise really in terms of performance either.

It's fabulous seeing Bytedance throw their weight behind open-source firmware and now promoting it and its benefits. This joins the likes of Open Compute Project / Meta, Google, and other hyperscalers that have also been increasingly vocal over the benefits of open-source system firmware. With this growing industry trend is also likely why Intel is making more flexibility around the FSP and AMD is working on an open-source CPU silicon initialization effort with the forthcoming openSIL.

Interesting times ahead for open-source firmware fans!