A Cloud/Hosting Provider Is Using Coreboot On Thousands Of Servers

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A Cloud/Hosting Provider Is Using Coreboot On Thousands Of Servers

A European cloud and dedicated server provider that designs their own servers is now designing their own BIOS using Coreboot and using this in production on thousands of servers...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Online-Scaleway-Coreboot-Server

[darkbasic]

This is awesome, every computer should have coreboot.

[scratchi]

That's cool! I want to see their gear

[deant]

I agree this is nice, and some hardware providers should offer coreboot compliant boards!

[cen1]

I am hosting a VM on Scaleway, super cheap and so far reliable. I missed this talk but I'll check it online when it comes out.

[UpsetingFact]

Is there any technical reasons on Coreboot mostly availble on decade-old hardware, which are mostly Core 2 ?

That's one of their biggest issue; and if they do allow to manually set FSB, performance would be okay for web browsing needs on Core 2 Quads nowadays...

[madscientist159]

Is there any technical reasons on Coreboot mostly availble on decade-old hardware, which are mostly Core 2 ?

That's one of their biggest issue; and if they do allow to manually set FSB, performance would be okay for web browsing needs on Core 2 Quads nowadays...

The technical reason is that the x86 vendors have decided to lock everything down. Look into the ME, the PSP, Boot Guard, and various forms of Secure Boot (a.k.a. making "your" computer secure from your own attempts to access it so that you are guaranteed not to pirate movies). Even this service provider is only using coreboot as a shim layer around the ME and the FSP; they are probably doing this to make their own internal management easier, but since they continue to rely on vendor blobs for the heavy lifting this approach doesn't offer many security advantages at all.

[polarathene]

I am hosting a VM on Scaleway, super cheap and so far reliable. I missed this talk but I'll check it online when it comes out.

That's good to hear. Last I looked about 6 months or so ago, Scaleway didn't have that good of a reputation iirc.

I'm fond of these providers:
Hetzner(Germany, dedicated servers with great price/value ratio and reputation, also support dedicated GPUs like GTX 1080 and AMD Ryzen options),
Vultr(KVM, great performance/value, lots of support docs from community, modern/nice management interface, custom ISO support, fast cloud instance spin ups, dedicated instances and dedicated servers, flexible blockstorage),
SSDNodes(best I/O speed that I know of, good value but fairly restricted hardware configs, openVZ or Docker only)

They all do pretty well for network bandwidth speed too iirc, top ranking. Hetzner provides 40TB of bandwidth a month at 1 gigabit, no throttling, cheap to add more too. Plenty of other providers have low bandwidth limits or claim unlimited at a certain speed, small print however throttles it down to dialup, or they don't have affordable(or option at all) to buy additional bandwidth. Not an issue for most people looking for hosts I guess, was for a client supporting a gaming community with mods and a lot of traffic(with Amazon or Azure that'd be like $1k+ a month).

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EDIT: Found in one of my notes this about Scaleway:

> Avoid Scaleway(whom is a brand of Online.net), [this reddit thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/webhosting/..._kinda_sucked/) gives good reason why.

Well that just seems to be false advertising and bad support after looking at it again, the subreddit has plenty of users not happy with Scaleway though: https://www.reddit.com/r/webhosting/...restrict_sr=on

[starshipeleven]

Is there any technical reasons on Coreboot mostly availble on decade-old hardware, which are mostly Core 2 ?

Intel does not publish documentation and blobs to port boards to Coreboot, the only way is to sign an NDA and pay large amounts of $$$ for a support contract to them. Only companies can afford that.

AMD is similar.

[uid313]

Would love to see some contributions from Scaleaway.
Maybe a nice graphical configuration menu?