Coreboot Now Supports Directly Booting To A Linux Kernel FIT Image

Coreboot's latest development code now supports parsing and booting of FIT payloads. FIT in this context is a Flattened Image Tree that leverages DeviceTree.

As of Tuesday in Coreboot Git is handling for booting of FIT payloads, which in turn basically means a Linux kernel image as a payload for Coreboot to boot directly upon hardware initialization.

This is an interesting addition particularly in the ARM space where FIT images have been around for years and supported by U-Boot. This 2013 presentation (PDF) covers more on the generals of FIT.

Now as of this commit, Coreboot mainline can support booting directly to a FIT image of recent versions of the Linux kernel directly while being more catered than the generic Linux payload for Coreboot or first needing to go through a boot-loader supported by Coreboot like GRUB or SeaBIOS and also being more geared for ARM hardware due to the alignment in the DeviceTree usage.