Hi all!
Myself, Stefan Reinauer and Rudolf Marek made a visit at embedded world 2009 in Nürnberg this week and I would like to tell you a little about what we did there.
As always it was nice to meet in person, especially Rudolf whom neither me nor Stefan had met before, although he has been quite active in the project for several years.
Overall I consider the visit quite successful. Perhaps even more successful than if coreboot would have been an exhibitor, because we would not have been able to move around so much if we had a booth to attend to.
A great number of interesting companies both for hardware and software were represented at the expo and some of the ones we spoke with were IEI, AXIOMTEK, MSC, Advantech, congatec, LIPPERT, Toradex, MSI, DIGITAL-LOGIC, VIA, JET-WAY, MEN, Radisys, Denx, QNX and Microsoft.
I would estimate that 85% of the displayed boards used Atom. There were also Geode LX, C7/Nano and some Core2 boards, but for every one non-Atom I still saw two or three Atoms.
I quickly learned one thing which was maybe not so surprising, the asian hardware companies do all BIOS development at headquarters. Axiomtek, MSI, JET-WAY and VIA did have representatives from HQ at the expo, but no engineers and no firmware experts. We still tried to establish as many contacts as possible, and everyone we met was quite helpful and promised to forward information and contacts to the appropriate people within their organizations.
Some highlights: * Discussing firmware with Mr. Lippert himself * Ad-hoc coreboot demo, twice!, at the SYSGO (Rudolf's job) booth party * VIA 855 chipset - H.264 playback and die still at 45 C with no cooling! * Free beer at the Microsoft booth talking to the owner of XP Embedded * Learning that the QNX bootloader is a clean 32-bit ELF built with gcc
Earlier this year Konsult Stuge and coresystems GmbH joined an industry consortium which has already established the next generation CPU module standard. The other members are mostly companies in the hardware sector so we gave a short coreboot presentation at the consortium meeting during the expo in order to shine a light on the benefits and possibilities which coreboot brings to the embedded segment.
For me as an open source enthousiast and evangelist it was really a great pleasure to attend the consortium meeting. Attitude and proceedings were much like in any open source project - with the small difference that just about everyone in the room wore suit and tie and was a heavyweight industry representative! I have never seen anything like it but I believe the modus operandi is completely unbeatable. We are very happy and proud to parttake in this venture!
The response was quite positive, as always the demo is highly appreciated, and we are happy to bridge the two communities. I believe there will be very valuable discussion on both sides, and that everyone will see good things come out of this!
Back at the expo QNX presented a nice fast boot demo on Atom. From reset to GL graphics in under two seconds. They have developed their own fastboot code (maybe using some reference code from Intel) but right now it is available only for Atom. Of course they were excited to learn that coreboot allows them to achieve the same performance on a large number of other platforms. We can use the bootloader (startup module in QNX terms) directly as a payload. Startup module + QNX kernel + QNX libc slimmed down is 400-600KB and a full version is 1.2MB. Doable on any board today. Pretty exciting! And QNX is freely available.
From Microsoft we learned that XP Embedded always uses kernel and HAL
from the normal XP build. XP Embedded is basically a totally modularizable Windows XP distribution, but the lowest layer is never changed. So because SeaBIOS starts normal XP, it will also start XP Embedded. Freeldr was not familiar to anyone in the MS booth, but they did like the prospect of booting kernel really quickly from reset - as always! :)
I have never been so convinced that coreboot is potent and worthwhile as I am today.
//Peter