Google Lands More Intel "Bay Trail" Changes In Coreboot

It looks like the Google Chromebooks powered by Intel's Atom and Celeron "Bay Trail" SoCs may be very imminent now... More code is being pushed into the open-source Coreboot project for bringing up Bay Trail support.

Generally new hardware support and capabilities to this open-source BIOS/UEFI implementation by Google engineers tends to mean that new Chromebook/Chromebox hardware is on the way. Google uses Coreboot in their Chrome* devices for better security and faster boot times.

At the beginning of February I wrote about initial Coreboot support for Intel's Bay Trail landing and this week there's been more code being merged for polishing up this initial hardware support.

Among the interesting Coreboot Bay Trail commits to point out include:

- New Bay Trail microcode has been committed.

- A new EFI wrapper is used.

- Support for the Chrome OS EC support with "Rambi".

- Support for enabling the Bay Trail graphics device.

Intel's Bay Trail processors have been interesting in the few months that they have been around due to their decent performance considering their low power envelope and especially now that they're using in-house HD Graphics with their open-source Intel Linux graphics driver rather than rely any longer on PowerVR graphics IP. Lately I've been testing the Intel Bay Trail NUC Kit with finding great Linux performance.