Why Facebook Loves Open-Source Firmware

Written by Michael Larabel in Free Software on 6 October 2018 at 07:22 AM EDT. 11 Comments
FREE SOFTWARE
With the Open-Source Firmware Conference 2018 videos having been uploaded this week, another one of the interesting videos to watch from this conference was about Facebook's preference for open-source firmware.

David Hendricks and Andrea Barberio of Facebook presented at the OSFC 2018 conference last month in Germany. They talked about Facebook's push towards LinuxBoot, OpenBMC, and open-source firmware in general.

Open-source firmware initiatives like OpenBMC and LinuxBoot are becoming standard for their Open Compute Project (OCP) hardware. They enjoy open-source firmware for greater firmware security, closed firmware being host to an array of potential problems, etc. They prefer a standard open platform for familiarity, a low barrier to entry by their developers, feature parity, and other benefits for their many data centers.

Facebook's current LinuxBoot platform relies on U-Root with Systemboot. Systemboot is their boot-loader Linux distribution that is written in Golang and provides tools for booting whether it be booting from a network, local storage, etc.

The Facebook open-source firmware session video is embedded below or there are also the slides for those short on time.

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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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