AMD commits to coreboot | Hacker News Reader

AMD commits to coreboot

blogs.amd.com

78 pointsbiehl13 comments

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.

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.

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...

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

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

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.

Yeah best to avoid them. It works best if you buy hardware around what works, rather than trying to work with poor undocumented stuff.

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.

What's wrong with EFI?

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).

> Rarely works. Doesn't solve any problems of the BIOS

Really? I don't think so.

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

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

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_system_effect

Massively overdesigned, and the designers clearly considered systems like COM and ActiveX good models to emulate.

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