

AMD commits to coreboot - biehl
http://blogs.amd.com/work/2011/05/05/an-update-on-coreboot/

======
protomyth
<http://www.coreboot.org/Welcome_to_coreboot>

coreboot (formerly known as LinuxBIOS) is a Free Software project aimed at
replacing the proprietary BIOS (firmware) you can find in most of today's
computers.

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justincormack
I had this running about 10 years back, and the number of boards it covers is
a little bigger now but still small. Odd mix of supercomputer and embedded
users. I wonder if any of the large cloud providers are using it, as it is
much more reliable than a BIOS which can fail in so many ways.

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zdw
Nice. Especially because it offers Open Firmware and EFI payloads:
<http://www.coreboot.org/Payloads>

I'm guessing that doing init work on 3rd party expansion cards is left up to
the OS. This makes sense, but might be troublesome for poorly designed
adapters...

~~~
brimpa
What role, then, do Open Firmware and EFI play if the hardware is being
initialized by coreboot?

\--hardware/low-level noob (bare with me)

~~~
zdw
The traditional x86 hardware init scheme is to run x86 machine code from ROM's
on the expansion cards. This of course limits the cards to only being used in
machines that can execute x86 machine code.

Open Firmware replaces this with Forth code on the card and a Forth
interpreter. This is how PowerPC Macs and Sun Sparc hardware would load card
drivers.

EFI's driver functionality is pretty much the same as Open Firmware, except it
uses an EFI Byte Code (EBC) as it's language.

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rwmj
Anything has to be better than the giant mess which is EFI. EFI is worse in
just about every way than the BIOS, which is quite an achievement considering
how everyone hates the BIOS.

~~~
m_eiman
What's wrong with EFI?

~~~
rwmj
Incredible complex. Rarely works. Doesn't solve any problems of the BIOS (with
the exception of the 2TB disk limit, but that could have been solved more
easily).

~~~
hexley
I've never noticed the EFI on my MacBook, it's certainly never gotten in the
way -- can you elaborate?

~~~
rwmj
EFI on Macbooks broke CD-ROM booting, which is pretty fundamental I'd say.

<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=527443>

