Dell Is Exploring The Use Of Coreboot, At Least Internally

Written by Michael Larabel in Coreboot on 23 March 2017 at 08:46 AM EDT. 18 Comments
COREBOOT
Dell appears to be using Coreboot on some of their modern Intel Atom motherboards paired with the Intel FSP and TianoCore.

An email sent by a Dell developer onto a public mailing list began with the marking, "Dell - Internal Use - Confidential." In there he comments on Dell using Coreboot, "We are using the coreboot project with Intel fsp to boot the Intel Rangeley based Mohonpeak CPU. We have built the Tianocore EDK2 project and used it as the payload to bring UEFI services to this bootloader."

The developer went on to ask a question to Coreboot developers about booting multiple UEFI operating systems when Coreboot is running on the board.

Mohon Peak is the Intel codename for Atom C2000 series processors, for newer Atom-based x86 servers. These Rangeley CPUs have been around for a few years now, based on the older 22nm process. But still that's a more appealing platform than many of the even-older Intel/AMD platforms where Coreboot/Libreboot is commonly used.

The message was posted to the public Coreboot mailing list.

It will be interesting to see if Dell ends up releasing systems/motherboards making use of Coreboot. But keep in mind, this would likely be for their server/workstation products where there would be greater demand rather than in consumer products. And their current usage of Coreboot at least with this Rangeley/Mohonpeak is an older Intel platform. Lastly, they are still making use of the Intel FSP (Firmware Support Package) and thus isn't a libre system with still mixing binary blobs with Coreboot. Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see what comes of this.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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