coreboot-announce

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coreboot-announce@coreboot.org

August 2009

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AMD RS780 docs released, coreboot support coming
by Carl-Daniel Hailfinger Aug. 8, 2009

Aug. 8, 2009

The coreboot community, which includes government organizations, corporations, research labs and individuals from around the world, is very excited to expand on our existing and decade-long collaboration with AMD. This collaboration has, over the years, resulted in the inclusion of coreboot into everything from some of the largest AMD-based supercomputers in the world to some of the smallest embedded systems. Together with the recent SB700/SB710/SB750 documentation release, the Developer Guide release for the RS780 family of Integrated Chipset/ Graphics Processors enables the coreboot community to support any board with AMD chipsets out there, from embedded to enthusiast desktop and high-end server boards. This new release once again demonstrates AMD's commitment to open standards and software that provides an improved user experience and Total Cost of Ownership for users in every walk of life. One cornerstone of this openness is the availability of documentation without NDA, enabling everyone to contribute. Coreboot is a BIOS/EFI alternative with optional BIOS/EFI backwards compatibility. Not only does coreboot enable extremely fast booting with well under one second spent inside coreboot, and total four second boot time from poweron to a working desktop, it also has superior reliability and realtime performance. Coreboot developers have embedded various operating systems, among them Linux and Plan 9, directly into onboard ROM chips yielding systems without moving parts and built-in network manageability. Virtualization is made easier by optionally embedding the KVM hypervisor into the ROM as well. Military strength encryption and access protection add-ons exist for environments where security is key. Its extended diagnostics in plain English are second to none. Of course, coreboot supports Windows XP/Vista/7 as well as Linux, *BSD and Plan 9. Coreboot is open source, so every interested developer or user can modify, tweak and extend it to their heart's content. An additional benefit of this documentation release is flashrom support for all AMD chipsets which enables users to reflash their BIOS/firmware/coreboot from within Linux and *BSD without rebooting. Coreboot code for the SB700 and 780 chipset family is already being worked on by Zheng Bao at AMD in his spare time and the coreboot community is happy to work with him on finishing and integrating the code into the official coreboot codebase. We'd like to thank Sharon Troia at AMD for making these documentation releases possible. The developer guides are available at http://developer.amd.com/documentation/guides/Pages/default.aspx#chipset More information about coreboot is available at http://www.coreboot.org/

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